“Yudin!” he barked at the top of his lungs. “This is your captain. You are not alone. We can all get through this together!”

This time he got the young midshipman’s attention. Yudin stared up from a dozen meters away. Their eyes met across the distance. The boy’s forlorn expression broke Losenko’s heart.

“I’m sorry, Captain!” he cried out. “But don’t you see? It’s too late. It’s too late for all of us!” He tore his gaze away from Losenko, turning his back on the other men. “I’m coming, Marina! I’m coming!”

No! Losenko thought, as if he might control the boy’s actions by sheer force of will. Don’t do it!

“Wait!” Komarov called. The crewmen surged forward... a moment too late.

Yudin flung himself from the deck, plummeting down into the frothing waters below. He hit the harbor with a splash. Frantic sailors rushed to the brink, risking their own safety.

“Nikolai!”

“Man overboard!” Trotsky shouted into a mike. A blaring klaxon sounded.

Losenko leaned out over the rail of the bridge, searching the waters below. At first, he feared that Yudin had been sucked under and drowned, but then he spotted young Nikolai bobbing to the surface several meters away from the sub. Without looking back, the sailor struck out for the shore, kicking and paddling with manic intensity.

Did he actually hope to find his long-lost Marina? Or had he simply been driven mad by grief?

His fellow officers spotted him as well. Another midshipman kicked off his shoes. He looked primed to dive in after Yudin. Others scurried back into the sub, perhaps to retrieve emergency rafts. Losenko was impressed by the men’s obvious determination to rescue their comrade.

Alas, he could not allow it.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted down at the men. “Do not leave this boat!”

Startled expressions greeted his orders.

“But... Captain....” Trotsky protested. “We have to get him back!”

“Belay that,” Losenko declared. Retrieving a man from the sea was a difficult and risky operation at the best of times, let alone when the man was suicidally determined not to be rescued. He had no intention of losing another man.

More objections came from the deck below.

“Please, Captain!” the shoeless midshipman begged. Other pleas joined the chorus. “We can still save him. Just give us a chance!”

Losenko turned to Trotsky. He held out his hand.

“Give me your sidearm.”

“What?” The deck officer blinked in surprise.

Losenko did not routinely carry a weapon aboard his own ship. “Give me the gun, damn you!”

Trotsky flinched. Losenko snatched the pistol from the deputy commander’s grip. Raising the binoculars to his eyes, he took aim at the swimming figure of Yudin. Waves batted the sailor back and forth, and the sailor’s soggy coveralls weighed him down, slowing his progress toward the shore. He hadn’t gotten too far yet.

“Captain!” Trotsky blurted out in alarm. “He’s just a boy!”

You think I don’t know that! Losenko thought. But nothing waited for Yudin ashore except a lingering death by radiation poisoning. And I’ll be damned if I send another man into that poisonous hellhole looking for him.

Yudin’s head and shoulders bobbed into sight.

Losenko pulled the trigger.

The sharp report of the pistol was the loudest thing any of the submariners had heard in weeks. The recoil jolted Losenko’s arm. The acrid smell of gunpowder polluted his nostrils. Through the binoculars, he saw Yudin disappear beneath the waves. A crimson froth spread across the water.

The captain’s stomach turned. He resisted the temptation to hurl the smoking pistol into the harbor. Instead he thrust it back into Trotsky’s hand.

“Silence those damn alarms.”

“Y-yes, sir,” the shaken officer stammered. He phoned down to the control room. The blaring klaxons went still. Dumbfounded crewmen milled about on the deck below. They looked confused and angry. Most of them were still reacting to what had just occurred. Losenko knew he had to tell them what to think before they turned against him for good.

He grabbed the mike.

“This is the captain,” he informed the entire crew. “Ensign Yudin attempted to desert this ship in a time of war. He has paid for this crime with his life. Let this be a lesson to you all.”

He slammed the mike into its cradle, more loudly than necessary. Then he turned to Trotsky, who snapped to attention.

“Increase security around the weapons locker,” he instructed, “and at all exit hatches—including the emergency escape trunk.”

Yudin would surely not be the last man to crack beneath the awful weight of Armageddon. Unless Losenko maintained a tight grip over the crew, he might soon be faced with a wave of suicides and desertions, maybe even a mutiny.

But how could he keep the men in line when the country they had sworn to serve had been decimated? They were without orders, without purpose. If Murmansk was any indication, the Kremlin was just a smoking crater now, and Mother Russian a gigantic graveyard.

Maybe Ivanov is right, the captain thought bleakly. Perhaps we still need an enemy.

He stared out over the water. Yudin’s blood had already been dispersed by the relentless current. The young sailor’s body had gone to join the broken ships at the bottom of the harbor. One more victim of... what? A computer malfunction?

Nikolai Yudin was gone, but Losenko knew he would see the boy again.

In his dreams.

“Set a course for Ponoy.”

Perhaps there was still something left to fight for.

CHAPTER SIX

2018

The old copper mill had been abandoned back in the 1930s, long before Judgment Day. Perched on the craggy slopes of the Wrangell Mountains, overlooking an icy blue glacier, weather-beaten wooden buildings clung to the snowy hillside like bird’s nests. The remote location of the ghost town—as well as the immensity of the Alaskan wilderness—had hidden the mill’s current occupants from Skynet’s surveillance, at least so far. Molly wondered how much longer the Resistance outpost would remain undetected. They had been living at the mill for six months now, ever since abandoning their previous camp outside Fairbanks. A new record.

“Derailing the train is just the first step,” Doc Rathbone insisted. “Once you get inside, the uranium is still going to be locked up tight.”

The old man was hunched over a drafting table in what had once been the office of the mine’s general manager. It was housed in a two-story log cabin a short hike away from the massive mill and crusher. Maps of the train’s route and surveillance photos of the Skynet Express were spread out on top of the table, along with cobbled-together diagrams and blueprints of the train itself.

Much of the intel had been downloaded from the central processing unit of a factory robot the Resistance had captured several months earlier. That had been quite a coup, albeit one that had cost the life of the cell’s previous commander. Doc Rathbone had been instrumental in cracking the CPU’s encryption in order to access the information stored in the machine’s computerized “brain.”

He was useful that way, which was why Molly put up with his eccentricities.

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