The Fellowship of the Hand (18 page)

“The city was built to withstand bombing,” Jason Blunt said. “You forget it was originally a missile defense command post. And hydrobombs are only effective within a concentrated area of a few feet.”

“Shall we test it, then, against the force of twenty hydrobombs?” Euler Frost’s voice was filled with confidence.

For a moment Axman thought it would be a standoff. But then one of the HAND men ran in, splashing through the shallow water that was beginning to collect in the corridor. “Army rocketcopters landing above!” he shouted. “Should I blast the computers?”

Jason Blunt turned and drilled him through the middle with a laser beam. In the same instant, Sam Venray dropped to his knees and flipped the half-empty backpack of hydrobombs directly at Blunt and Ambrose.

Frost moved in and Axman followed, using his damaged rifle as a club. Ambrose turned and ran as the hydrobombs scattered across the floor. Blunt, unnerved and uncertain, tried to bring his pistol around for another shot but Axman hit him across the temple with the rifle butt.

“Are those timed?” Frost yelled to the black man.

“Not yet,” Venray grinned, scooping up the fallen hydrobombs. “But it sure worried them!”

“I’ll go after Ambrose,” Axman said, but as he reached the corridor he realized the hopelessness of the task. The pale man had already disappeared into the smoke.

He turned back into the room and saw that Blunt was on the floor, dazed by the blow, with blood from a scalp cut speckling the shaggy white rug.

“There must be another way out of here,” Euler Frost reasoned. “Blow the machines, Sam, and we’ll take our chances. Another five minutes and it’ll be too late.”

The sound of the stunners reached them, and Venray called from the doorway. “It’s already too late. The Nova technicians are counterattacking, dismantling the bombs!”

“Do what you can!” Frost ordered. Then, to Axman, he said, “Come on!”

“What about Blunt?”

“Leave him.”

“It’ll be safer to kill him now.”

“Leave him, I said!” Euler Frost barked. “I told you we don’t kill unless necessary.”

He bent to scoop up Blunt’s fallen laser pistol and then ran into the corridor with Axman following.

As they watched, one of Venray’s hydrobombs exploded in a burst of liquid fire, tearing the front from a million-dollar computer and leaving it a mass of mangled wreckage and crackling, arcing wires. The force of the explosion knocked loose panels from the radiant ceiling, which were dropping among the dead and wounded in the smoke-filled chamber.

“Troops coming down the stairs,” Venray warned. Two more computer banks exploded, but then he cursed and said, “I can’t set off the others! The short circuits are interfering with my radio waves.”

“This way, then,” Frost decided. “Ambrose ran down here somewhere. There may be a way out.”

They fought their way through the smoke, splashing through occasional puddles of water. Axman had picked up a fallen stunner, discarding the ruined laser rifle, and he held it ready as he ran. Once, when a white-suited technician lunged at them from a cross-passage, he downed the man with a close-range blast.

“We’ll be lost in here,” Axman said as they ran on. The smoke was clearing now, but there seemed nothing ahead but more passageways and rooms.

They passed another row of smaller computers, built into the rocky walls of the corridor. Venray paused long enough to attach hydrobombs to two of them, with a wire strung across the passage about a foot off the floor. “If they come following us, they’ll get a surprise,” he said with a chuckle.

They started to move off, but suddenly Frost hesitated. “No,” he decided, “unhook it, Sam. There are still HAND people back there. We might kill our own men.”

Sam shrugged and did as he was told. As he bent to his task, Axman went to help, and carefully slipped one of the hydrobombs into his own pocket. It could come in handy later, and it was much more effective than the stunner he carried.

They hurried on along the passage, past separate cubicles that were obviously living quarters. “Zone seven,” Frost said, reading a wall sign. “On the chart in Blunt’s office, zone seven was the outer one, at the very back of the complex. There was some indication of an exit here.”

“I sure hope so!” Venray said. Behind them, far in the distance, the thud of stunners echoed.

“Somebody up ahead,” Axman cautioned. They were coming to a widening in the passage, a recreation area with artificial grass underfoot. He could see a group of people half hidden by the picnic tables and chairs of the underground park. There were three—two men and a woman.

“Hold up,” Frost said. “I recognize one of them. It’s Carl Crader!”

“So it is,” Axman agreed. His hand closed around the hydrobomb in his pocket. To kill Crader might be a real bonus, even more than killing Euler Frost.

Then suddenly there was another voice behind them. “Walk slowly, hands up, or you’re dead!”

Axman turned just far enough to glimpse a man with an odd tattooed design on his left cheek. He was covering them all with two laser pistols.

S
HE HAD NEVER BEEN
so terrified in her life.

The waiting in the silent, man-made park under the earth, with the rays of some artificial sun beating down upon them, had been bad enough. But now suddenly the threat of violence emerged again. The man with the tattooed face had heard someone approaching and had hidden himself in a service closet along the passageway. When the three men passed, he stepped out, covering them with laser pistols.

“They’re the leadership of HAND,” Carl Crader said, hurrying forward. “Euler Frost and Axman. I don’t know the black man.”

At Masha’s side, Stevro grunted and spoke in a low voice. “This might be our chance to get away, my dear, if you want to go. There’s a spiral stairway over there, leading up through a metal shaftway. That man Vikor said it was the way out.”

But she didn’t know what she wanted. Watching Vikor disarm the three from HAND, she thought for a moment that the worst was over, that they might still all make it out of this place alive.

But then, with a sudden movement almost too quick to follow, the man Crader identified as Axman leaped forward, grabbing Euler Frost as a shield.

“All right, Crader!” he shouted. “This is a hydro-bomb. Call off your man or we all die.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Frost said, struggling to free himself from Axman’s grip.

Carl Crader was walking forward, ignoring Axman’s threat. “You wouldn’t use Euler for a shield, Graham. HAND needs him too badly.” He motioned Vikor away, but the tattooed man still held his lasers.

“HAND doesn’t need him at all! Go on and kill him—it’ll save me the trouble later!”

“Give me that hydrobomb, Graham,” Crader said, reaching out his hand.

Graham Axman snarled and pushed Frost forward into Crader. He stepped back and was raising his arm to hurl the hydrobomb when suddenly it exploded with an ear-splitting roar, drenching Axman in a sea of liquid fire.

Within seconds there was nothing left of him but a heap of flames, burning brightly against the emerald green of the artificial grass.

The blast of the hydrobomb had knocked Masha down, but she struggled to her feet and hurried to help the others. No one seemed badly hurt, although Crader and Frost, closest to the explosion, were bruised and shaken as they stood up.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Crader said, inspecting a minor blast burn on his hand, “but I’m certainly thankful it did.”

Euler Frost glanced over at the black man. “Sam?” he questioned.

Venray nodded and produced a tiny transistorized device from his pocket. “I set it off with a radio wave. Hated to do it to Graham, but it was him or us. He was really crazy.”

“Yes,” Frost said, staring down at the burning heap. To Masha he looked as if he’d lost an old friend.

“I can still hear stunners,” Crader said.

Frost turned to him. “Your people again. The troops to the rescue.”

“Where’s my husband?” Masha blurted out. “Have you killed him?”

“He was alive the last we knew. Just a bump on the head.”

Venray looked uncertainly at Vikor, who still held his laser guns. Then he said to Frost, “We’d better keep moving.”

Frost nodded. “We’re going out the other exit, Crader.”

But the CIB director shook his head. “I let you escape once before, Euler, after the attack on the medical center. This time you stay. Perhaps you can convince a court of law that your cause is just.”

“Axman didn’t convince anyone.”

“Axman didn’t try.”

Frost turned to the black man. “Go on, Sam. I’ll stay here.”

“You’ll both stay,” Crader said. “There’s a great deal to be explained here, and until it is, no one is leaving.”

There were shouts from along the passage, and the sound of others approaching. Masha wondered who it would be this time—more of HAND, or the army troops, or maybe even her husband and Ambrose? Whoever it was, she wanted to get away from here, wanted to go back to the island, where life was so much simpler.

She saw Jason first, leading the way, and after that she saw no one else. Her vision blurred with tears and for the first time in her life she realized that she really loved the man for all his faults. What had started as mere sexual attraction back in New Istanbul had grown into something much more.

Now, seeing the spots of blood along his temple, she wanted to run to him. But before she could move, Crader called out, “Earl! Over here, Earl!”

He was calling to a younger member of the party, a handsome man who wore smoke goggles and carried a stunner. But even as she saw him, backed by a dozen battle-ready troops, she felt a sudden yank on her arm that spun her around, off balance.

“That’s him,” the man named Earl shouted. “The one with the tattoo! He tried to kill me at the zooitorium!”

But the man named Vikor already had his laser to her forehead, pulling her along in some mad embrace as he ran toward the stairs going up. “Don’t struggle,” he rasped in her ear. “Don’t struggle. I have killed many like you.”

Crader and Earl started after them, but Vikor sent them scattering with a blast from his laser. It was Jason, running hard, who came closest, and he barked a quick command. “Vikor—let her go! Are you mad?”

But then Crader had her husband by the arm, pulling him back. “He doesn’t obey you, Blunt. He never has.”

“But that’s Vikor! He works for me.”

“Not you, Blunt. He works for Stanley Ambrose, and he’s a murderer. I spotted him at once from Earl’s description, but I wanted to see if he might lead us to Ambrose.”

“But …”

“Careful! He’s already killed a man named Rogers, and probably Milly Norris as well. And a third person too.”

Vikor pulled her along, now at the base of the spiral stairs, and forced her to climb ahead of him into the darkness. With the laser he held off pursuit and started up after her. “No tricks,” he said. “Or, I’ll kill you.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Out of here. Away.” He nudged her in the small of the back with his pistol. “Keep climbing!”

“These stairs go on forever. We must be a hundred feet below ground!”

But he forced her on, prodding her with the weapon. She was all but exhausted from the climb when she heard a light scraping of metal from above.

Someone was ahead of them on the stairs!

She held her breath, then coughed, hoping the sound would cover the footfalls from above. “What is it?” Vikor demanded.

“Nothing. I … I have to stop. I’m out of breath.”

“Keep climbing!”

She peered into the darkness above, trying to make out a human form. Had it only been a rat or some desert creature she’d heard?

Then suddenly there was someone really there, pressing past her to grapple with Vikor. She recognized the familiar harsh odor of soilweed and knew that it was Stevro.

Stevro, good old Stevro.

Escaping himself, but taking time to rescue her. She hadn’t even realized he was missing after he’d asked her to come along, but obviously he’d used the hydrobomb explosion to cover his exit.

“Stevro!” she gasped. “I can’t see you!”

“That’s all right, my dear,” he gasped, very close to her. “I got you into this, back in the beginning. I guess it’s up to me to get you out.”

They were struggling for the laser pistol on the narrow spiral stairway, and she could see neither of them in the darkness.

Then there was a gasp from Vikor and the weapon clattered down the steps. Stevro moved in for the kill, and it was only too late that she remembered the tattooed man’s second gun.

Stevro, he has another!

“Stevro, he has another!”

But the laser beam jumped and cut, lighting the darkness for an instant. She saw Stevro take it full in the stomach and start to fall.

In that instant, when he must have felt death very close, Stevro still managed to hang on, to fling himself at his murderer. There was a gasping scream torn from Vikor’s throat, and then both of them toppled over the railing down fifty feet to the bottom.

For a long time Masha clung there sobbing, frozen in position. They had to come and get her, coaxing her gently down.

But then there was Jason to comfort her, and Carl Crader to say, “Come now. Come, come. It’ll be all right. It’s almost over now.”

E
ARL JAZINE CAME UP
shaking his head. “There was no one missing from that Lexington plant, chief. I checked them all out. But there’s someone missing right here. The troops have searched the entire city, every room in the place, and there’s no sign of Stanley Ambrose. He must have escaped up through that emergency exit before you reached it.”

The medic had treated Crader’s scorched hand, and crews were busy cleaning up the damage done by the flooding and HAND’S assault. The bodies of Graham Axman and Stevro and Vikor had been removed along with the other casualties. In the executive office, Jason Blunt sat with his wife, waiting for the final scene of the drama. Near them, handcuffed together, sat Euler Frost and Sam Venray.

“He didn’t escape,” Crader said. “Stevro came back down those stairs because he couldn’t get the exit open. The rain short-circuited the electric release latch. No one went out of there today.”