Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

“You can’t stop it, Gabriel,” Velda said in her suddenly affectless voice. “It’s done. They’ll pay for what they did to my father.”

“I said get her out of here,” Gabriel growled.

Millie reached for her. She shrank back, but he scooped her up in one big arm and dragged her to his chest. He looked her in the eye. “If you don’t want what those two got, Velda, you’ll come quietly. No biting, no hitting, no kneeing, no gouging. You try anything, you’ll be out cold before you know it.”

“Do you enjoy manhandling women,” Velda said, struggling in his grip, “because your daddy gave you a sissy name?”

“No, ma’am,” Millie said. “I like my name just fine. Now quiet down or I’ll show you what real manhandling’s like.” He tightened his grip on her and headed off, ignoring her demands that he put her down and leaning on the spears in his other hand for support.

Gabriel turned back to the machine. If it couldn’t be shut off, maybe it could at least be redirected? He took hold of the dial and turned it. The coordinates on the readout changed as he did so and he heard a grinding noise from the inside of the machine, as of some sort of internal mechanism laboriously being shifted to a new setting. So it wasn’t too late for that: he could aim it at a different target.

But…what target? He’d turned the dial at random; he didn’t recognize the new coordinates, didn’t know what location he’d set it to. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, it looked like—maybe Russia. But he couldn’t leave it there, obviously. The people there didn’t deserve the destruction Velda had set in motion any more than the people of Berlin did. It was a Sophie’s Choice he was facing, he realized, only on a monumental scale: to have to select not an individual but an entire city on earth to be destroyed.

Unless—

He was finding it hard to concentrate, hard to think at all, with the buzzing and the pain in his head, but he forced himself to focus.

Could he choose a location so remote, he thought, so unpopulated, that what ever effect this device had wouldn’t hurt anyone—somewhere in the middle of a desert or the ocean, say?

It was an idea—but to make it work he’d need to know the coordinates of such a location, and he didn’t. He knew the coordinates for plenty of places, but they were all places he’d been, and there wasn’t one of them he’d be prepared to consign to destruction. There probably were some completely barren areas the Untergang device could target without harming anyone—the sort where governments conducted nuclear tests, for instance. But he was damned if he knew where they were, certainly not with the pinpoint accuracy that setting this machine required. He might be able to come close, to make a reasonable guess—but if he was off by a few degrees in specifying the coordinates, it could mean hundreds of thousands of lives. Or millions.

He looked over the notebook again. Any deviation will reduce intensity in inverse proportion to the square of the distance…

Maybe there was a way at least to choose a better rather than a worse target. Not by trying to decide what city deserved destruction, but by limiting the extent of the destruction itself. The Nazis had sent their mission here to the South Pole because this was apparently the perfect location from which to strike at Washington, D.C. A strike originating here that was directed at a different location would have “reduced intensity,” Groener had written, with the reduction being greater as the target’s distance from Washington increased. So the best possible place to strike if you wanted to do the least possible damage would be a location as far as possible from Washington, D.C. But where would that be?

He’d have been able to think more clearly if only his head hadn’t been pounding and his vision hadn’t been going blurry. It felt like his skull was being crushed in a wine press.

Where, damn it? Where could he direct the Untergang device to strike so it would do the least possible damage?

The answer came to him with sudden clarity.

He even had the coordinates.

He flipped back through the notebook, looking for a particular sentence he’d seen earlier.

Finding it, he turned the dial. His hand was shaking as he did so and his ears were ringing. The edges of his vision were not blurry any longer but blood red, and the borders of this red patch were encroaching on the center—it was as if he were looking at the world through a narrowing tunnel. But at the end of the tunnel he could still make out the panel showing the coordinates, and he kept working the dial until it reached the setting he wanted.

What was the farthest target from Washington, D.C.?

Right here.

To target Washington, device must be placed at precisely the following coordinates…

He got to his feet when the coordinates showing on the panel matched the ones shown in the notebook—the very spot where Gabriel was now standing. Let the Untergang machine target itself. At minimum intensity, in the barren wastes of Antarctica—there weren’t a lot of places less populated, certainly. That is, if you ignored this anomalous valley itself; even at minimum intensity, it might be irreparably damaged, maybe destroyed. But if he could get the people of the valley on the plane and make it out before the machine went off…

A new light flickered on above the coordinate panel, a bright yellow bulb that slowly blinked on and off. Then a man’s voice, crackling with static, spoke, a recorded voice out of the distant past, perhaps Dr. Groener himself.

“Fünfzehn minuten zur aktivierung…Fünfzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”

Fifteen minutes to activation.

Not much time to load a half-century-old plane with two dozen hostile women, only one of whom spoke any English. Not to mention getting that plane in the air.

Which meant he had to leave now .

Gabriel turned to make his way out—and saw Velda storm through the doorway, Millie’s two spears clutched in her hands.

Chapter 27

“Step away from that machine, Gabriel,” Velda said, coming toward him. Her gown was in shreds, leaving her naked to the waist and barely covered below.

He didn’t move. “What did you do to Millie?”

“Made him put me down,” she replied flatly as she crossed the room, raising the spears to point at Gabriel’s chest. “Remarkable what a kick to a broken ankle will do.”

“You shouldn’t have done it, Velda,” Gabriel said. “He was taking you to safety. This place is going to be destroyed in minutes.”

“ This place? What are you talking about?” Her voice suddenly wasn’t affectless anymore.

“I reset the device,” Gabriel said. “To target itself.”

“You did what ?” Velda came to a stop.

“I can’t let you kill millions of innocent people. No matter what the women here did to your father. Or what the Germans did to him sixty years ago.”

“You had no right,” she snarled. She jabbed one of the spears at him. He knocked its point aside with his forearm.

Velda lunged for him with the other spear, its sharpened stone blade whistling through the air directly toward his face. He ducked at the last second and it clanged against the metal sphere behind him. She pulled it back while stabbing out with the first spear again. It caught him high on one thigh, drawing blood.

He reached out, seized the shaft right behind the blade, and yanked it out of her grip. Spinning it in a circle like a staff, Gabriel brought the point around toward Velda. They faced off, weapons aimed at one another.

“Vierzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”

“If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die,” Gabriel said. “This thing’s going off in fourteen minutes.”