"What do you make of it?" asked Giordino reverently, as if he were standing in a cathedral. "A temple to their gods?"
"More likely a mausoleum or a shrine," said Pitt, gesturing at the heads rising from the floor. "These look like memorials, perhaps to revered men and women who explored the ancient world and those who were lost at sea."
"It's amazing the roof didn't collapse after the comfit's impact or the later accumulation of ice."
"Their builders must have worked under exceptionally high standards that were possible only under a structured culture."
They gazed in fascination down a network of windowless corridors whose interior walls were beautifully painted with scenes of spectacular seascapes that began with calm waters and progressed to waves whipped by hurricane furies beating against rocky shorelines. If modern men and women looked to the heavens for their God, the Amenes had looked to the seas. Their statuaries were of men and women, not stylized versions of gods.
"A long-lost race who discovered the world," Giordino said philosophically, "And yet there are no artifacts lying around, and no sign of the inhabitants' remains."
Pitt nodded at the network of narrow passages carved into the ice. "No doubt recovered by the Nazis who discovered it, and later taken by the Wolfs to their museums on board the Ulrich Wolf."
"Doesn't look like they excavated more than ten percent of the city."
"They had more mundane things on their mind," said Pitt sardonically, "like hiding Nazi treasures and secret relics, extracting gold from seawater, and planning to destroy the world so they could make it over into their image."
"Too bad we haven't the time to explore the place."
"There's nothing I'd like better than to take the grand tour," said Pitt, shaking off his captivation, "but we have twenty-five minutes or less to find the control center."
Wishing they could linger, Pitt and Giordino reluctantly turned their backs on the great edifice and hurried back to the square and climbed into the Snow Cruiser. Still following the tracks left by a Sno-cat, Pitt steered the big cruiser through the heart of the haunting ghost city and rolled it into a tunnel beyond the mausoleum of the Amenes. Pitt drove less cautiously the closer they came to the mining compound, while Giordino crouched below the instrument panel with his Bushmaster sticking through the shattered middle windshield.
Almost a mile deeper into the tunnel, they rounded a bend and found themselves confronted with an electric auto coming in the opposite direction. The three startled security guards in the other vehicle, easily recognizable in their black uniforms, stared incredulously at the monster bearing down on them.
The driver panicked and slammed on his brakes, skidding across the ice floor of the tunnel without reducing his speed in the slightest. The other two guards had a higher regard for self-preservation and leaped from the auto in a futile attempt at prolonging their lives.
There was a series of shrill screeches from shredding and grinding metal as the Snow Cruiser smashed into the electric auto and rolled over it as though it were a tricycle mashed by a garbage truck. The driver disappeared, along with his crumpled vehicle, under the Cruiser, while the other two guards were crushed against the ice walls of the tunnel by the great tires. As Pitt stared back in his side-view mirror, he saw only a pile of twisted junk sitting flattened on the floor of the tunnel.
Giordino twisted around in his seat and stared back through the slanted rear window of the control cab. "I hope you paid your insurance premiums."
"Only liability and property damage. I never take out collision."
"You should reconsider."
Another two hundred yards through the tunnel, groups of workers in red coveralls were moving wooden crates onto a train of flatbed cars that were connected to a large Sno-cat. Forklifts were transporting the crates past a thick silver steel door whose mounting bolts led deep into the ice. The massive door looked like the types that were used in banks to safeguard the contents of their vaults. A short entryway through the ice led into a spacious cavern.
Two security guards stood stunned at the sight of the gargantuan Snow Cruiser, plunging from what should have been an abandoned tunnel. They stood transfixed in the glare of the headlights. Only when Giordino fired a short burst from his Bushmaster through the broken windshield into the forklift did workers and security guards come alive and scramble back into the cavern to save themselves from being mashed by the mechanical avalanche bearing down on them.
"The door!" Pitt shouted, slamming on the brakes.
Giordino did not acknowledge or question. Almost as if he'd read Pitt's mind, he leaped from the Snow Cruiser and ran to the steel door, as Pitt squeezed off several rounds from his Colt .45 through the doorway to the cavern to cover him. Giordino was surprised by the light touch it took to push the door closed. He'd expected to exert every ounce of strength in his body, but the heavy steel door swung as easily as if it hung in air. Once it clicked against its stops, he turned the locking wheel until the bars slid into their sockets, sealing it closed. Then he found a chain on the forklift and wrapped it around the wheel, securing the end to a wheel of a flatbed car loaded with crates, until it was impossible to turn from the inside. Now the Wolf security guards and workers were effectively imprisoned without any prospect of a quick escape.
"I wonder what's inside the crates?" Giordino said, as he climbed back into the control cab.
"Artifacts from the city of the Amenes, I'd guess." Pitt ran the Snow Cruiser through the gears until he had regained top speed again. An angel perched on the roof of the cab might have helped them this far on their wild passage, but they still had a long way to go. True, surprise was theirs, but it seemed remarkable that they had come this far without a shot being fired at them, a situation that could quickly change, Pitt well knew. The powers of their angel had her limits, assuming that it was a she. Events had been met and overtaken. Once the Snow Cruiser burst out into the open, it would be a different story.
Every gun in the compound would train on it.
At a wide bend in the tunnel, they suddenly burst out into the almost measureless hangar housing the Destiny Enterprises jet aircraft. Without lifting his foot from the gas pedal, Pitt quickly surveyed the two Airbus A340-300 passenger and cargo planes parked in the center of the hangar. A Sno-cat with a train of flatbed cars was stretched beneath the cargo door of the first aircraft, the familiar wooden crates riding up inside the fuselage on a conveyor belt. Wolf Enterprise engineers and workers were climbing boarding steps at the other plane for the trip to the giant superships. Sitting off to one side was a sleek executive jet that was in the process of being refueled.
Pitt relaxed slightly at seeing no security guards. "What have we here?"
"Ah-ha!" Giordino tensed, seeing Pitt's leg stiffen as if he were trying to push the accelerator pedal through the floorboard. He raised a prudent eye over the instrument panel and groaned softly. "Are you going to do what I think you're going to do?"
"Once you drive in a demolition derby," said Pitt, with a diabolical gleam in his eyes, "you never get it out of your blood."
The reaction from everyone in the hangar at seeing the Snow Cruiser appear out of nowhere was the same as that of the others who had confronted it in the tunnel earlier. They all froze in pure astonishment, the expressions on their faces quickly turning to incomprehension and cold fear at seeing a red mechanical demon incarnate burst out of nowhere.
Pitt took less than three seconds to assess his route of destruction. It took the same amount of time for all to realize that his intentions were unmistakable. With a mind-set two notches beyond tenacious, he set a course across the ice floor of the hangar, as straight as the crow flies, toward the first Airbus. The aircraft sat high off the ground, but not high enough for the side fenders of the Snow Cruiser. The right front panel immediately below the side windows of the control cabin caught the aircraft eight feet inside the aft section of the port wing, crushing the ailerons and shredding the wingtip.
The cargo loaders and aircraft maintenance crew were galvanized into action and flung themselves clear as the leviathan struck the aircraft, pivoting it around at a ninety-degree angle as the tires on the landing gear skidded over the ice. They sprawled, desperately slipping and scrambling to get as far away as possible from the thundering titan gone mad. The only sounds they identified were the engines racing through the gear changes. Nothing else about the giant machine looked remotely familiar. But they briefly glimpsed the face of a heavily bandaged Pitt twisting the steering wheel back and forth, and Giordino pointing his Bushmaster menacingly out the side window. They'd seen more than enough to call for security guards, but their frantic appeal came much too late to stop the destruction.
The Snow Cruiser ripped into the outer wing of the second Airbus. This time Pitt cut too far inside the wing. In a horrible screeching sound, the devastated wing jackknifed around the front end of the Snow Cruiser tire and hung there. Pitt crammed the gearshift into reverse and jammed down the gas pedal. The Cruiser backed up, pulling the aircraft with it. Pitt wrenched the steering wheel as far as it could go, desperately attempting to shake free from the aircraft, but the tangled wreckage held, and the Cruiser's mammoth tires began to lose their grip on the ice and spin uselessly.
Pitt threw the Snow Cruiser into forward and then reverse, as if he were trying to rock a car mired in mud. Finally, after a series of vicious metallic shrieks, the wing released its grip and dropped awkwardly, its wingtip touching the ice and looking like a piece of torn and tangled aluminum with a reservation at the scrap yard. Then, without flinching or betraying the slightest expression of emotion, Pitt pitched the Snow Cruiser in the direction of the executive jet.
"You don't screw around, do you?" Giordino said in resigned amusement.
"Listen!" Pitt snarled. "If this scum fixed it for an apocalypse to strike the world, they can damn well stay here and suffer along with everyone else."
The words were hardly out of his mouth when the battered Snow Cruiser pulverized the tail assembly of the Wolfs' private jet that sat much lower to the ground than the much larger aircraft. No contest this time, the Snow Cruiser ripped off the vertical and horizontal stabilizers as if they were a balsawood tail on a model airplane. Its fuselage effectively sliced into two parts, the executive jet collapsed disjointedly, the wings and bow pointing upward as if in a takeoff mode.
Giordino shook his head in wonder and said admiringly, "You'll never get invited back if you leave a mess everywhere you go."
Pitt turned to Giordino, a smile as wide as the horizon on his face. "Time sure flies when you're having fun."
Pitt looked up and saw a Sno-cat suddenly appear in the cracked and broken remains of the rearview mirror. He wasn't overly concerned, at least not yet. The Snow Cruiser, he estimated, was probably five miles an hour or more faster.
He threw the big Cruiser through the tunnel, striking and skidding off the ice walls in a daring attempt to inch ahead of the security guards in the Sno-cat. He careened through the bends, temporarily out of the line of fire, gaining time and widening the gap until the Sno-cat no longer came into view.
"You've lost them," said Giordino, brushing the shattered glass from the rear window off his shoulders as calmly as if it were dandruff.
"Not for long," said Pitt patiently. "Once we break into the open, we'll be fair game."
Four minutes later, they cleared the final bend in the tunnel, running past equipment that had been abandoned and doors leading into empty storerooms, and two minutes after that, the Snow Cruiser roared free under a blue sky, exiting less than half a mile from the center of the main compound.
At long last they reached their destination and had their view of the mining facility for the first time.
They had exited the tunnel at one end of the compound. Unlike most ice stations, which were mostly buried under snow and ice, the Wolfs had kept the buildings and roads running between them swept clean and clear. The smaller buildings stood in circular fashion around the two main structures comprising the extraction plant and the control center.
The thunder of gunfire abruptly tore the chilling air, as flames clawed upward from several buildings, with black smoke rolling high into the sky before flattening under an inversion layer. Explosions sent debris flying into the air, accented with bursts from automatic weapons. Bodies could be seen sprawled in the streets, bloodied red and grotesque in the snow, two black uniforms for every one in white camouflage fatigues.
"It would appear," Pitt said grimly, "the party has started without us."
<<44>>
Despite the long, hard training, and the bravery and dedication of Team Apocalypse in attempting to stop the cataclysm, the mission was about to collapse. They were taking hits and falling wounded and dead for nothing. They had not achieved one fragment of advantage. Disaster was piling on disaster, when Cleary's worst fears were realized. Jacobs's SEALS, unable to strike the flank of the barricade, were inexorably driven into the same perimeter along with the other teams. The trap was complete. Every hole was plugged. The entire assault force was boxed in with no way out.
Grenade shrapnel slashed Cleary's chin and a bullet struck him in the hand. Of his officers, Sharpsburg was down with wounds in an arm and shoulder. Garnet was coughing blood from a hit in the throat. Only Jacobs was still unscathed, as he shouted encouragement to the men and directed their fire.
Then, unexpectedly, the security guards ceased firing. The Special Forces maintained a ragged counterfire until Cleary ordered them to stop all action, wondering what card the Wolfs were about to play next.
A voice, distinct and refined, came over loudspeakers on the buildings around the facility, echoing up and down the roads-- a voice whose message was relayed to Washington through the microphones worn by the special force.
"Please give me your attention. This is Karl Wolf. I send greetings to the American assault teams who are attempting to infiltrate the Destiny Enterprises mining facility. You must know by now that you are heavily outnumbered, surrounded, and entrapped with no means of escape. Further bloodshed is pointless. I advise you to disengage and retire back to the ice shelf, where you can be evacuated by your own people. You will be allowed to carry your dead and wounded with you. If you do not comply in the next sixty seconds, you will all die. The choice is yours."
The message came as a jolt.
Cleary refused to accept inevitable defeat. He stared helplessly at the huddled and bullet-torn corpses of the dead and the bleeding bodies of the wounded. The eyes of those ready and able to fight on still reflected fearlessness and tenacity. They had fought savagely, bled, and died. They had given all that was humanly possible. But they could do no more than go down fighting, a last stand, unknown and unmourned.
The redoubtable Cleary by now had only twenty-six men in fighting condition left out of the original sixty-five who had parachuted from the C-17. They were assailed from the front and scourged from the rear by the remaining armored Sno-cats. He fought off a venomous pessimism and a bitterness he'd never known before. It seemed hopeless to mount another assault, but he was determined to make one more try. To push forward would amount to nothing more than a suicide charge. And yet there was no thought of disengaging. Every man knew that if they didn't die here and now, they would certainly die when the Earth went mad. With deep misgivings, Cleary regrouped what was left of his command for a final assault on the control center.
Then, in the silence of the temporary ceasefire, he heard what sounded like a car horn blaring in the distance. Soon it became louder, and every head on the battlefield turned and stared, mystified.
And then the thing was upon them.
"What is happening?" Loren burst over the murmur of male voices at hearing the vocal burst of confusion over the speakers.
Everyone in the war rooms of the Pentagon and White House automatically glanced up at the monitors displaying static photos of the facility. For long, disbelieving moments, everyone sat in open amaze
ment, listening spellbound to what they heard through the communications speakers.
"My God!" Admiral Eldridge uttered in a stunned croak.
"What in the devil is going on down there?" demanded the President.
"I have no idea, Mr. President," muttered General South, unable to comprehend the chaotic words of the Special Forces teams, who all seemed to be shouting at once. "I have no idea," he repeated vaguely.
Something totally macabre was happening on the battle site of the mining facility. The men of the Special Forces team, as well as the security guards, swung in shock. Cleary found himself staring through unblinking eyes with a stark, unfettered expression of bewilderment at a monstrous red juggernaut rolling on enormous donut tires that burst into view like a crazy man's nightmare. He watched in hypnotic fascination as the giant vehicle smashed into both armored Sno-cats, knocking them on their sides and squashing them, as the force of the impact hurled the startled guards into the air before they fell in broken heaps on the ice. Flames mushroomed in curling spires over a bursting canopy of screeching, tumbling doors, tractor treads, steel splinters, and armor plate. The monster never slowed, its driver never decelerating, as it relentlessly continued its spree of destruction.
Jacobs shouted for his men to leap aside, as Sharpsburg, in frantic disregard for his wounds, scrambled out of the way of the rapidly approaching monster. Garnet and his team gawked in blank disbelief, before they were abruptly galvanized into diving against the walls of the buildings to save themselves.
Then the thing was upon them, rushing past with an earsplitting roar from the exhaust headers whose mufflers had been torn off when crashing into the Sno-cats. It was a sound that none of the warriors, crouched dazed and stunned in the snow, could ever forget. And then it rampaged into the ice barricade as if it were made of cardboard.