dupli-cating exactly the main door system. In addition, the run-way elevator had sliding panels which could be brought into place to bombproof this opening as well.
Rourke swept his binoculars along the profile of the mountain. Spaced what appeared to be approximately a quarter mile apart were radar scanning devices, the dishes moving, searching, like hungry mouths wanting food.
At the height of the mountain, in what appeared almost a dish-shaped valley, but the dish of concrete, looking for all the world like a massive radio telescope, were the particle beam weapons. These were ringed by conventional radar controlled anti-aircraft guns and banks of surface to air missiles. The particle beam devices rose perhaps five hun-dred feet skyward on huge crane-like gantries. There were two of these and the mountings at their bases seemed mo-bile which would give each unit more than one hundred eighty degrees of movement and nearly a full one hundred eighty degrees of movement from the horizontal.
A low flying aircraft could get under their range of move-ment — but the surface to air missiles and anti- aircraft guns would take care of that possibility.
“I have been watching you,” Natalia whispered from be-side him. “Watching the set of your jaw, watching your mouth—it is impregnable, the Womb, isn’t it?”
Rourke put down the Bushnell binoculars. He let out a long breath which became a sigh. They lay side by side in a hollow of rock which would keep them from overhead visi-bility. He said to her, “It’s as impregnable as anything can be made. We can’t sneak in, we can’t shoot our way in, we can’t blast our way in with explosives, we can’t fly in, we can’t rappel down into it. We can’t even wait until nightfall—the infrared system the GRU said they have, the starlight sys-tems. And anyway, the main doors are closed and the Womb is hermetically sealed in the event of the next dawn bringing the ionization effect. We can’t even crash a plane into the particle beam weapons. A plane big enough to carry sufficient explosives wouldn’t fly low enough to avoid the system, and even if the system were down and they didn’t have time to bring it up to emit the pulse, the anti-aircraft guns and the surface to air missiles would knock us out. Maybe a thousand planes, all of the pilots kamikazes, each aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon —maybe that’d do some good.”
“What if the particle beam weapons already had targets they were locked to—”
“The SAMs, the anti-aircraft guns again. And anyway, it takes only a few seconds to switch targets once the system is activated and charged—at least that’s what your uncle’s data tells us. And besides, even if we knocked out the parti-cle beam weapons so Rozhdestvenskiy couldn’t use them against the Eden Project when it returns, he’d have time to rebuild them, possibly once it was safe to move about on the surface again. If we don’t destroy their cryogenics ability, a thousand highly trained men from the KGB Elite Corps would be more than a match for one hundred and thirty-eight men and women who are scientists, doctors, teachers, pilots, farmers—like that.”
“Perhaps the Eden Project shuttles will land out of range of the particle beam system,” Natalia offered.
“Just postpone the inevitable—and anyway, if you were the commander of the Eden Project and returned to an earth where everything had changed, been obliterated, what would you do?”
“Use my onboard systems to scan for power supplies, power sources—in the hopes of finding something left of civilization.”
“That’s why they built the Womb here,” Rourke told her, “and not somewhere else. They’ll home right in on the Womb, like kids running home from school looking for a snack. And there’s no way to warn them. And if we could warn them, what would they do? Where would they go? Somehow, we have to get inside. And we have to do the job today. There might not be a tomorrow. And we have to get in before nightfall. And if we have any hope of ever getting out with any of the cryogenic chambers and the serum, we have to be able to get out before nightfall, too, when the Womb is hermetically sealed—otherwise, we’re trapped in-side unless we can get to the control center and beat the in-formation out of the master computer which is locked into the defense system.”
“It is impossible,” Natalia whispered, her eyes wide, star-ing—at what he didn’t know.
Rourke felt a smile cross his lips. “But that’s to our ad-vantage. Making it impossible for us will force us to try something thoroughly desperate, something only people who were doomed and had no alternatives would try. And that’s the sort of thing no system of security can be made to anticipate.”
“Then we have a chance?”
“If there’s one thing I believe in—besides you, besides Sarah and the children, besides Paul’s friendship — I believe that as long as you never give up, you’ve always got a chance. So yeah—we have a chance.” And Rourke shifted the binoculars back to his eyes, watching the entrance to the Womb. Just what exactly their chance might be—of that he wasn’t certain.
Chapter Twenty-seven
There was a certain let-down. He had accomplished all. He sat quietly in his office, smoking a cigarette, studying his Colt Single Action Army revolver which lay on the desk beside him. He would never need to use it again. There were no more enemies to fight.
He—Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy—ruled the world.
It was the dream of Caesar, of Alexander, of Napoleon, of Hitler, perhaps of Stalin.
But he had achieved it.
Twenty years after the awakening, his population could easily have tripled. It was believed that the cryogenic proc-ess served to restore the body while it slept. If that were the case, perhaps, he thought, perhaps —
His father had lived to the age of seventy-three. His mother still survived, well into her eighties. His grandpar-ents had been long lived as well.
Perhaps, through the cryogenic process, his life span might surpass theirs. Disease on the new earth would be vir-tually unknown, the same process which would destroy all sentient life destroying much of the world’s disease produc-ing organisms.
A world without infectious disease.
He smiled.
The Eden Project. “A Garden of Eden.”
And he would be its master.
A barren garden at first, but the plants, the embryonic animals which were even now being cryogenically frozen under the aegis of Professor Zlovski.
Rozhdestvenskiy touched his fingertips to the desk top—soon he would touch his fingertips to the earth and give it life again.
Because of his abilities and his ruthlessness—one was no good without the other, he had always known.
He stood up from his desk, walking across the office, to stare at himself in the mirror.
Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy saw the face of God and it was his own face.
Chapter Twenty-eight
They had followed the course of the roadway leading down from Cheyenne Mountain. It was patrolled by four wheel drive vehicles with one driver and two guards, each vehicle fitted with an RPK 7.62mm light machinegun, each of the LMGs fitted with a seventy-five round drum maga-zine.
Rourke, Natalia, Reed and Vladov watched the road from a quarter mile distant. “I agree with you, Rourke, with all these people who speak Russian like natives—”
“We are natives, Colonel,” Vladov interjected.
Rourke laughed.
“Anyway,” Reed observed, “we might be able to bluff our way through if we can take over one of the smaller convoys. But how the hell we’re gonna do that with those patrols on the road I don’t know.”
“In the Chicago espionage school,” Natalia began, taking a cigarette, Rourke lighting it for her with his Zippo, “we were taught that what is familiar is the least suspected. We can utilize this to our advantage. We have, after all, twelve men in Soviet uniform who are in fact Soviet soldiers.”
Rourke reached out and touched her hand. Then he lit his own cigar, inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, exhaling as he said, “I think what Natalia’s getting at is that those guys in the road patrols can’t be too high up the echelon. What if Captain Vladov and Lieutenant Daszrozinski just marched their men down onto the roadway and flagged down one of the patrol vehicles—then take out the guys running it.”
