11:22.
Strapped tightly into the harness, Max threw the fabric he held bundled in his arms into the storm. Like a dog seizing a rat, the wind snarled and snatched it, tossing him into the air. Max plunged into a surreal world. Snow and ice below, turbulent black clouds above. Lightning cut across the valley, showing him exactly where to go. He tugged on the paraglider’s risers, spilling air from the canopy. The web of lines connecting him to the wing above his head sizzled with tension. A compass and airspeed indicator were stitched into the harness.
The air bit his skin; pellets of hail stung his hands. He fought the gale to stay on course for the towers. As each lightning flash crashed across the landscape Max saw movement below. Wolves. They shadowed him, perhaps believing it was their master beneath the black wing. And if he fell? They would soon realize that the figure wearing the mask was not Fedir Tishenko. It didn’t matter. He felt as if he was running ahead of the pack. Leading them.
Max pulled down on the risers, collapsing air out of the canopy. The drop was dramatic. Too much. He corrected, shifted his weight, threw a hand up to protect himself as lightning slashed across the veiled rain. This was the wildest ride of his life.
The two towers were in a compound. They looked like watchtowers in a prisoner-of-war camp, but they were only two hundred meters apart. And there were no huts other than a brick-built structure, half underground, that looked like a generator room. It squatted at the perimeter fence. A raised hump of ground went from the base of each tower into this building.
Max was tossed across the sky. A gust had swept around the side of the mountain. This was the wind shear he knew Tishenko had avoided. Now it forced Max to fight for his life. He pulled this way and that, cascaded down the side of the far reaches of the mountain, turned into a confused wind and spilled even more air. He was going down. Fast. And aiming straight for the compound.
Fire strangled the towers. But then Max realized that what he saw were cables carrying the lightning strikes down into the ground, along those humps in the ground and into the building.
A figure stood in the wire-mesh control box at the top of one tower. Lightning laced itself around the cage, trying to reach him, like a frustrated monster. But as long as Tishenko stayed in the zero field he was safe. One finger outside that safety zone and he would die like an insect flying into a bug zapper. He manipulated the two control levers that guided the ten-meter parabola-like a big satellite television dish. It caught lightning and threw it into the preset dish on the other tower. Sometimes the lightning divided itself and struck both parabolas at the same time, creating an even more powerful electrical charge.
Tishenko neither saw nor heard Max’s approach, but he turned and gazed into the night, his sixth sense as strong as ever. A black-winged creature with the face of a wolf swept out of the sky. Max Gordon had survived and still attacked. So, the boy wore the mask of a wolf man? Then he must be prepared to die as one.
Max knew he was coming in too fast. If he tried to turn now he’d be dragged into that cheese grater of a fence. He let go of everything, covered his head with his arms and tucked his legs back into the paraglider’s seat.
With no tension on the control lines, the canopy fluffed with air, rose two meters and then stalled. Max dropped less than the height of his dorm table at Dartmoor High.
Unbuckling the harness, he ran into the devil’s furnace. Lightning exploded, tortured wind screamed through the tower’s wire-mesh cage, and in the far distance a rolling ball of fire tumbled down the valley’s sky, parting the clouds like a meteor scars the night sky.
Over the storm’s deafening smash he heard a man scream. Tishenko. Cursing Max Gordon.
11:30.
The inner core of the second tower was a lift. He pressed the button. No doors-an open platform sped him upwards. Max was inside what felt like the biggest exploding firework in the world. A flash blinded him. Black, melting blobs swam in front of his eyes. Tishenko had swept the dish down and thrown a bolt of lightning at Max’s tower. And again. The power slammed the cage where Max now stood. Two gamelike control levers sat on a console panel. Whatever Tishenko had preset was immediately unlocked by Max’s pressing the manual control button. Max heard the hum of power as he tweaked the handles. The dish on his tower responded immediately. There was no time lag between command and response.
As Max swung the dish into the sky he saw the fireball move ever closer. Beyond this valley Lake Geneva sat trapped between two mountain ranges. An anvil blow along this telluric line would shatter the valley’s floor, like tapping an egg against the rim of a frying pan.
11:32.
Two minutes left!
Tishenko struck Max’s tower again with another bolt of lightning. It shook, and for a moment Max felt that it would shudder itself into a crumpled heap. His dish caught a bolt of lightning and threw it against Tishenko’s tower. If it was a game Tishenko wanted, Max was up for it.
The natural phenomenon tearing across the sky now looked like a fiery meteor crashing to earth, but it was the spear tip of a mighty lightning strike. Catastrophe was about to strike, and a scientist-monk had predicted this very disaster. The chain-mail fist of fire was going to pulverize the inside of a mountain in less than …
11:33.
Tishenko had killed Sayid! Max’s anger burned as brightly as the storm, his concentration blocking out the shattering noise. Tishenko and Max traded blows. Lightning bolts clashed like medieval swords in personal combat across the two-hundred-meter battlefield between the towers.
Tishenko slashed Max’s tower again, an enormous strike that lit the whole area. Max reeled. Tishenko saw the boy stumble, the impact slamming him to the cage floor.
The flash of light held the valley in its glare. Max stared at the looming black monster of a mountain. It rose up into the heavens, forcing aside the clouds, its peak like a bear’s head, its jagged ridges grasping the valley floor-clawlike.
Max’s mind did not reason, his thoughts did not question.
11:34.
The cosmic lightning struck.
Max twisted the controls. The fiery bolt seared from the dish and severed the bony ridge of mountain that looked, in that instant, like a bear’s claws.
Every moment of Fedir Tishenko’s existence encapsulated itself in a microsecond. He was the fire god who would destroy and create life. Touched by the power from the sky when a child, he could not be harmed again. So he was baffled at the searing pain that shafted through his chest and thrust him against the cage’s mesh wall. The eye of the storm recognized its long-lost son, reached out with a cruel stiletto lightning strike and took him home.
Time moved in slow motion for Max. His tower was collapsing; the mountainside exploded and Sharkface stood in the firelit snow, next to a motocross bike, his arm still extended, having loosed the arrow from Tishenko’s hunting bow. The shaft had pierced Tishenko’s chest and then thrust its steel tip through the cage wall, offering itself, and its victim, to the lightning.
Max’s tower collapsed slowly, crumpling as wearily as an armor-clad knight beaten into submission. He clung to the control box, heard tearing metal as the structure flattened the perimeter fence and then the tower’s death rattle: its steel groaning in final surrender.
The earth trembled, wind snared the clouds and within one hour the crystal-clear night settled a frost across the land and Max’s crumpled body.
Then the wolves came.
Silence can be bought; events can be explained with half truths and scientific explanations. There were more than a dozen deaths from the battle inside the mountain that Corentin and Thierry fought alone. Official reports stated that seven of these men were members of a climbing team stranded on the notorious north face of the Citadel. Inexperienced climbers, they were caught by the minor earthquake that shook the region that night, and five rescue workers died trying to bring them off the mountain. It was a tragedy.
There was considerable damage to one of the lower-lying villages but, thankfully, there were no fatalities. An undisclosed number of scientists monitoring seismic activity in the Citadel research center had been rescued, which explained the presence of Swiss and French forces in the area that night-a wonderful example of cross-border
