“I am not responsible for them,” Halls said. “They’re a bunch of progressives going to greet their almighty computer.”
“Good God, man, you have no idea what’s going on and neither do they. You have to stop them right away!”
“They’re not my responsibility.”
“By the law of the high seas, they were passengers on your ship, and you’re abandoning them in harm’s way,” Captain Norris retorted.
“What’s the big deal?” Halls wanted to know. He looked ahead. The first zodiacs were within half a kilometer of the shield. “They’re just going to hit that shield, bounce off, and come on back. They…” Halls paused, his hand still on the send as something came out of the shield. “What the devil is that?”
It looked like a black cloud, but it kept shifting in shape very quickly, as if it were alive.
“Full speed, hard port,” Halls ordered. The nose of his ship very slowly swung in the direction of the zodiacs. Halls could see Parker standing up in the lead boat, hands in the air, as if supplicating the dark cloud.
The F-14 banked hard away from the shield. That made Halls think. “Full astern,” he yelled into the tube leading to the engine room. “Hard starboard,” to the helmsman.
“I’d get out of there!” Captain Norris confirmed his decision over the radio. “What’s going on?” Halls demanded.
“I don’t know,” Norris said, “but whatever is on that island took down the George Washington.”
Halls swallowed. He’d seen the Washington one time in Sydney Harbor. He knew there was no comparing his ship to the carrier.
The black cloud descended onto the boats, swarming over the people inside. As his ship ponderously turned away, Captain Halls watched the people in the zodiacs collapse and flail about.
“Get us out of here, Helm,” Halls said, even though he knew the ship was moving as quickly as possible.
But then the people in the first boat began resuming their positions. Halls pulled up his binoculars. He trained them on that zodiac. Parker was standing once again. The man was looking directly back at the Island Breeze. His body was twitching, but the eyes were steady, glowing with the same insane light Halls had been witness to the entire voyage. But something was different. Halls twisted the focus on the glasses, then his fingers froze on the knobs. The skin of Parker’s face was rippling, as if there were something alive just under the surface. Halls shifted to the other people in the boat… all had the same thing happening to them. One of the women stood up, her hands ripping at her own face, blood flowing through her fingers, her mouth contorted in a scream Halls could not hear. She staggered to her feet, then fell overboard.
In another boat, a man was pounding his chest, screaming. He flopped back, his legs drumming against the floorboards of the zodiac. Then he was still.
The black cloud was gone, but Halls could see that the rubber pontoons of the zodiacs were covered with a black film that was moving on its own in surges.
Halls went back to the lead boat. Parker’s mouth moved; he was yelling something to the people in his boat and the other zodiacs nearby. Halls lowered the glasses. Two of the zodiacs turned and headed for the Island Breeze, throttles wide open, the boats planning out. The others continued toward the shield wall.
“More speed!” Halls yelled into the tube to engineering.
Halls knew the zodiacs could catch his slow-moving freighter. He focused on the lead boat chasing him. A man was standing in the prow. As Halls watched, the movement under the man’s skin stopped. The man’s face twitched in a wide smile that was not pleasant at all.
The two zodiacs had already halved the distance to the Island Breeze. Halls knew there was no way he was going to escape.
The F-14 Tomcat came in so low that Halls thought it clipped his mast. There was a line of smoke on the left side, and Halls could hear the whine of a highspeed gun firing.
The 20mm bullets hit the surface in a column of water spouts until they struck the lead zodiac. The milk-bottle-size bullets made short work of both the rubber boat and the people in it. The F-14 climbed and turned.
Halls pulled his binoculars up. The second zodiac had not wavered in the slightest, completely ignoring the fate of its partner. It was less than three hundred meters from the Island Breeze and still closing. Each of the people on board was totally focused directly ahead at the ship, their faces blank of expression.
The Tomcat came in from the left this time and ripped the boat to shreds. Halls saw one of the people take a direct hit from the 20mm round, the upper chest completely disintegrating and the body flying forty feet before landing in the water.
The Navy jet made two more runs, bullets churning up the sea where both boats had gone down.
“Goddamn,” Halls exclaimed, watching the merciless strafing.
The radio crackled to life. “This is Captain Norris. You are to maintain a heading of nine zero degrees until in sight of my ship. At that time you will be prepared to be boarded. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” Halls replied.
“This is not good,” Yakov said.
Mike Turcotte stared at the pile of fresh rubble that blocked the tunnel in front of them and didn’t have the energy to respond to that most brilliant observation. They had gone about a quarter mile from the scene of their fight with Katyenka, the tunnel slowly bending to the left and still descending. They had not passed a single door or side passageway in the time it had taken them to traverse that distance to the other blockage Pasha had initiated. They had already dug through one pile of rubble, eating up precious time. Now here was a second.
Instead of answering, he grabbed a block of concrete, picked it up and carried it about twenty feet back the way they had come, and dropped it. He returned to the blockage and picked up a second piece. By the time he dropped it, Yakov had picked up a hunk of rubble and joined him.
They worked in silence and in a small dust cloud for an hour, slowly making their way farther down the corridor. Finally, Turcotte sat down and took a break, Yakov joining him. The Russian pulled his always-ready flask out of a pocket and offered it to Turcotte, who shook his head.
“Did you suspect Katyenka was one of The Ones Who Wait?” Turcotte asked.
Yakov sighed, then answered. “If I had suspected, I would never have allowed her that close, and certainly never allowed her to, how do you say, get the drop on us back there.”
“Then my next question is, why didn’t you suspect her?” Turcotte rubbed some dirt off his forehead. “You’re the one that’s been lecturing me all along to trust no one.”
Yakov was silent for a long time before answering. “She seduced me.” He forestalled Turcotte by speaking with a wave of his hand. “Not so much with the body… although she did do that, but here.” Yakov thumped his hand on his chest. “I have spent so many years doing this, traveling all over the world. I thought I was a man with no heart, but every man has a heart. I realize now I was hard on you about Dr. Duncan, because in my own mind I knew I was being foolish with Katyenka, allowing her too close. But I could not admit it to myself. It is an old Russian saying that when something another person is doing bothers you, look to yourself. Because I did not, here we are, trapped.”
Turcotte stood. “Let’s get untrapped.”
Colonel Tolya’s patience was running out. His patrol of twenty commandos was gathered behind him as he kneeled next to the engineer lieutenant, trying to make sense of the various plans unrolled before them on the tunnel floor. The earth underneath Moscow was a warren of tunnels, shafts, and man-made caverns burrowed out over decades of Cold War survivalism.