Ted Bell - Tsar

“Where?”

“I saw a house with a dock out on the end of that point. Where there’s a dock, there might well be a boat.”

“How much time?” Hawke cried, following Halter across the slippery algal rocks that lined the shore.

“Forty minutes! We might still save her, Alex. We’ll try, anyway.”

As logic or fate or luck would have it, there was a boat.

A beautiful wooden runabout, maybe twenty-five feet long. She looked fast enough, Hawke thought, racing down the dock toward her. She looked well maintained, probably with a big inboard Volvo engine. They could make it over to Morto in a hurry.

“Check the helm for ignition and keys,” Hawke shouted to Halter. Hawke leaped aboard at the stern and opened the engine-hatch cover as the professor jumped down into the cockpit.

“No luck!” Halter cried.

“Never mind, I’ve got it,” Hawke said, two bared wires in his hands. Suddenly, the big 300-horsepower engine roared to life. And just as suddenly, it conked out.

“What’s wrong, Alex?”

“I don’t know. Felt as if it wasn’t getting any fuel.”

“Fuel shutoff valve?”

“Yeah, but where is the bloody thing on these engines is the problem. I’m looking.”

“Alex, we have perhaps thirty-five minutes until the beginning of the end of the world. Find it quickly, would you, please?”

Hawke muttered something obscene as his head disappeared below the hatchway. Halter stood in the cockpit, watching helplessly as the ferry bearing Korsakov moved ever nearer to the long dock emerging from the heavily wooded island, a low-lying black silhouette on the horizon.

“Cast off all of the lines except the stern,” he heard Hawke’s muffled voice behind him say. “Just in case I find the damn valve. Wait, is this it? Yes? No, damn it!”

Five minutes later, the big Volvo rumbled to life again, and Hawke came up through the engine-room hatch in a hurry. He uncleated the stern line and jumped down to join Halter in the cockpit, grabbing the wheel and shoving the throttle forward. The sleek mahogany runabout surged forward, throwing a wide white wake to either side.

Five minutes later, they were ghosting up to a rocky beach with the motor shut down. Hawke hopped off the bow with the anchor in his hand, waded ashore, and wedged the hook between two large boulders. Then he hauled the boat in closer to shore and called out to Halter, “Are you coming?”

“Can’t you get it in any closer?”

The man was sitting on the stern with his legs dangling over the side, cradling the Beta machine in both hands.

Hawke was about to tell him to be careful, when the windshield of the runabout exploded into a million pieces. He whirled in the direction of the gunfire. A guard with a German shepherd at the end of a leash was running toward them, shouting something in Russian. He extended his arm again, aiming his submachine gun at Halter on the run. Hawke pulled the Walther from his holster, drew a quick bead, and shot the man once in the head.

Halter was splashing ashore, holding the detonator above his head, as Alex bent over the dead body.

“What the hell are you doing?” Halter said.

“Looking for a radio. See if he called us in.”

“And?”

“Nothing. No radio. Good. Here, take his gun. Bizon Two. Excellent weapon. Know how to use it?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I hope the sound of those shots didn’t carry up the face of that rock. Here are a couple of extra mags of ammunition. Let’s move. I saw the house from the water. It stands right at the top of this granite cliff. But I think I saw a path up through the woods around that point. We’d better hurry. Time?”

“Nineteen minutes,” Halter said, worry plain on his face.

“Let’s go.”

“God, this is close.”

“I hope God’s watching this channel,” Hawke said, sprinting down the beach and up into the woods at a dead run. His mind was racing, too. Find Anastasia, find a way, any way at all, to get her away from her crazed father before he and Halter killed the man. Five-hundred-yard kill radius? Is that what Kuragin had said about the Beta’s destructive range? He’d do it somehow, get her outside that circle of death.

But he was fast running out of time.

And Halter still had his finger on the trigger.

Hawke was first to reach the clearing at the top of the granite cliff. And first to see why the Tsar had been in such a hurry to get to the island of Morto.

By Tsarist standards, the house itself was nothing extraordinary. It was a four-story Swedish Baroque mansion, standing in a wide snowfield, pale yellow in the moonlight. The interesting thing was not the old mansion but the silver airship hovering just a hundred yards above a steel mooring mast on the rooftop. The ship was descending, coming in to dock. The same ship Hawke and Anastasia had flown to Moscow.

Handling lines were even now being tossed down from the bow to a crew waiting on the roof. Red navigation lights fore and aft were blinking, and there was a massive Soviet red star on the after part of the fuselage. On the flank, the word Tsar in huge red letters was illuminated. Korsakov was in a hurry to get out of Sweden and back to Fortress Russia, it seemed.

The rooftop was well lit. Hawke whipped out his monocular. He could see a number of sharpshooters and armed guards in addition to the ground crew now handling more tether lines as they were tossed down to the roof. At least the damn thing hadn’t already taken off with Anastasia aboard. No, she was still somewhere inside that house. There was still a chance.

He’d find a way inside. Get her out of that house. And then-

“Crikey,” Halter said, slightly out of breath, joining him at the edge of the woods. “A bit steep, that.”

Hawke was too busy calculating the odds to reply. There was open ground all the way around this side of the house. It was perhaps a hundred yards to the covered entranceway at the front door. But he could circle around through the woods. Maybe the house was closer to the tree line around the back. He pulled the Walther from its holster, checked that there was a full mag and a round in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a weapon against sharpshooters with SDV sniper rifles. But then, what the hell were you going to do? Life was seldom perfect.

“Time?” Hawke asked.

“Fifteen.”

“A bloody lifetime,” Hawke said. “I’m going inside that house and bring her out.”

“That’s insanity! It’s wide-open ground for at least a hundred yards on all four sides of the house. Bloody suicide with those sharpshooters up there, Alex. Use your head, man!”

But Halter saw a look in the man’s cold blue eyes that told him any argument was a waste of precious time. He slipped out of his fur coat, spread it out on the snow, and placed the machine carefully on top of it. With practiced fingers, he knelt on the bearskin, opened the Beta, and booted it up. Then he flipped an illuminated red toggle, arming the unit.

“Do what you have to do, Stefan. I’d do the same in your shoes. But I’m going inside that house now. I’ll get her out. Or I won’t. If I’m not back in ten minutes, with or without Anastasia, blow the whole damn house down. Kill the madman and everyone else inside. A million lives are at stake. It doesn’t matter who dies in there to prevent that.”

“Alex, listen, it’s bloody over. I’m sorry about your friend in there. But you can’t help her now. You won’t get twenty feet across that open ground. They’ve got night-vision equipment. I can’t even give you covering fire with the Bizon, because they’d take me out before I triggered the detonator. Christ, just wait until he boards. We’ll take him out when the ship’s over the fjord. I’m just sorry as hell, but that’s the end of it.”