A hit—the C-4 exploded, Natalia’s truck swerving, the left fender glancing off the walkway, the truck bouncing, lurching, but moving ahead.
One van gone. The other still coming.
The pickup slowed, Rourke running for it, stabbing both pistols into his belt, jumping, clawing for the side of the truck bed, his fingers closing for it, hurtling his body weight over and inside, rolling, crashing against the coffin-shaped boxes of the cryogenic chambers.
Rourke picked himself up to his knees, changing sticks for the Detonics pistols. As the pickup swerved to avoid the wreckage of the Firebird and the motorcycle, Rourke saw Rozhdestvenskiy, crawling, alive, away from the wreckage, and for a second their eyes met.
The last van was still coming. Rozhdestvenskiy’s voice echoed through the corridor. “Kill them!”
Chapter Sixty-seven
Reed climbed, glancing to the Timex on his left wrist, smudging away the blood from the crystal. If what he had done to the particle beam system worked, the system would explode in a matter of minutes, he reasoned.
He was still only a third of the way up the gantry, the American flag beneath his fatigue blouse still, his .45, half-loaded only, in the military flap holster at his belt. The sec-ond .45 he had carried for a time he had lost in battle.
He kept climbing, his right palm bloody and raw from scraping against the metal, his left arm blessedly numbed to the pain there, his abdomen hurting—he felt like throwing up but didn’t dare. When he coughed, blood spurted out.
He kept moving.
Soon—very soon.
The sun was truly setting and he noticed it more than he had ever before—very red, very beautiful.
He kept climbing.
It was the one thing he had to do.
Chapter Sixty-eight
Rourke climbed around from the truck bed, reaching for the passenger side door, Natalia springing the door as he shouted to her, Rourke swinging his left leg inside, then fall-ing to his knees on the seat.
He twisted around, the M-16s making movement in so confined a space awkward, Natalia saying as he slammed the door closed, “We should be just a few minutes away from the bombproof doors leading into the hangar bays—if the doors are still opened.”
“They’re gonna want to stop us, not just box us in, Rozhdestvenskiy had to figure on that. Unless he gets on a radio and tells them to close, they should be open—any-way—they can’t stop their supply shipments just for us—we gotta worry about that last van.”
Exhausted, Rourke unslung the M-16s from his shoul-ders, leaning through the window. The van was closing, the LMG beginning to open up. Rourke fired the M-16, toward the windshield
— but it would be bullet proofed.
The slugs had no effect.
“Give this thing all the gas it’s got,” he roared to Natalia. “And gimme the extra C-4 you took off the American cor-poral’s body. If those doors to the hangar bays are closed, it won’t get us through anyway.”
“Agreed.” Natalia pushed her black canvas bag across the seat. “It’s inside.”
Rourke opened the bag —a nightgown, a hair brush, a half-dozen speed-loaders for the L-Frames she carried.
It wasn’t in the outside pouch. He zipped open the main compartment—the C-4, beside it tampons and a half-emptied carton of cigarettes. “Women,” Rourke murmured. He took the C-4, snapping the brick in half, then began knead-ing it in his hands, the other half returned to the bag. It was starting to soften.
“I’d say hurry up, he’s closing on us.” Gunfire hit the wall to their left, a ricochet cracking more of the windshield, Na-talia making the truck swerve, then straightening. “The turn-off should be up here.”
“Right. You let me off when you take it, then drive like hell for a hundred yards or so. And fast.” Rourke formed the C-4 into a mushroom shape—it was the consistency of the Play-Doh his children had used when they were small.
“Here it is,” Natalia shouted, the truck skidding, the rear end fishtailing, Natalia downshifting, fighting the wheel, the truck turning, the cargo shifting behind them — Rourke heard the sound of glass breaking.
One of the bottles of serum—had any of it survived?
She turned the truck into the access corridor, Rourke swinging open the door, the truck slowing, Rourke jumping down, falling to his knees, shouting, “Get outta here.”
The van was making the turn. Rourke waited, the van coming, the LMG starting to fire again, slugs hammering the concrete wall of the corridor.
Rourke had the reloaded Python in his left fist. In his right the mushroom shaped chunk of plastique, soft at the top, very soft.
He hurled the C-4, shifting the Python to his right fist, the C-4 hitting the grill at the front of the van, molding around the metal, sticking there.
Rourke fired at the van—a miss, the van still coming, Rourke running, running harder than he had ever run in his life.
To his right ahead was a small access tunnel. Rourke jumped to the walkway, vaulting the railing, stabbing the Python outward as a line of machinegun fire etched along the wall surface toward him.
He double actioned the Python once, diving to the small access tunnel, the roar deafening as he covered his ears and hugged his forearms against the sides of his head — he could feel the force of the explosion tearing at him, feel the heat of it.
The explosion died.
Rourke got to his knees — part of his shirt had been torn away.
He stood up, his hands shook.
He stooped over, picking up the Python.
He stepped to the end of the access tunnel. The van was a mass of twisted metal, still smoldering, the upholstery burning in patches along the road surface.
Ahead of him, Natalia had stopped the truck. She was reversing, Rourke started to run to meet her.
If the serum had survived—even a little of it, he could at least save Sarah and the children, Paul and Natalia—at least them.
If the bombproof doors to the hangar bays were only open.
He kept running, the Python still in his right hand.
Chapter Sixty-nine
The bombproof doors had been open—maybe he lived right, he thought. The door on the pickup’s passenger side wide open, Rourke hugged the doorframe, firing out first one, then the second of his two M-16s, cutting down per-haps a dozen of the KGB hangar bay personnel, the rest running back through the doors.
Rourke jumped clear as Natalia slowed the pickup.
“I’ll find us a plane. You get those doors sealed—the mechanism’s over there,” and he pointed to the far wall.
He started running across the hangar bay, searching for the right aircraft, sufficiently large to handle the cargo, suf-ficiently fast to get them where they needed to go, with little enough landing field required to put her down.
That the hangar bay doors had been open told him one thing — Rozhdestvenskiy would be waiting to stop them on the field above.
He found the plane, stopping before it — a substantially modified Grumman OV-1 Mohawk of the type used in Viet-nam. He ran to it, to begin pre-flighting. Already, the bombproof doors were closing behind him ...
It wasn’t the perfect aircraft, it required too much run-way space for landing, but he could set it down on a high-way and then taxi it off the road. With luck he’d make it close enough to the motorcycle he had left behind, hidden in the trees near the field he had used when he’d landed the prototype jet fighter, the same craft they had used to fly to Chicago to see Varakov.
With the truck back near the cargo doors, and Natalia’s help, he had loaded his backpack, the six cryogenics chambers, the six spare parts kits for the chambers, the six moni-toring consoles, the six spare parts kits for the monitoring equipment—and the one remaining jar of the serum—the others destroyed.