Tsar

“I hope God’s watching this channel,” Hawke said, sprinting down the beach and up into the woods at a dead run. His mind was racing, too. Find Anastasia, find a way, any way at all, to get her away from her crazed father before he and Halter killed the man. Five-hundred-yard kill radius? Is that what Kuragin had said about the Beta’s destructive range? He’d do it somehow, get her outside that circle of death.

But he was fast running out of time.

And Halter still had his finger on the trigger.

68

Hawke was first to reach the clearing at the top of the granite cliff. And first to see why the Tsar had been in such a hurry to get to the island of Morto.

By Tsarist standards, the house itself was nothing extraordinary. It was a four-story Swedish Baroque mansion, standing in a wide snowfield, pale yellow in the moonlight. The interesting thing was not the old mansion but the silver airship hovering just a hundred yards above a steel mooring mast on the rooftop. The ship was descending, coming in to dock. The same ship Hawke and Anastasia had flown to Moscow.

Handling lines were even now being tossed down from the bow to a crew waiting on the roof. Red navigation lights fore and aft were blinking, and there was a massive Soviet red star on the after part of the fuselage. On the flank, the word Tsar in huge red letters was illuminated. Korsakov was in a hurry to get out of Sweden and back to Fortress Russia, it seemed.

The rooftop was well lit. Hawke whipped out his monocular. He could see a number of sharpshooters and armed guards in addition to the ground crew now handling more tether lines as they were tossed down to the roof. At least the damn thing hadn’t already taken off with Anastasia aboard. No, she was still somewhere inside that house. There was still a chance.

He’d find a way inside. Get her out of that house. And then-

“Crikey,” Halter said, slightly out of breath, joining him at the edge of the woods. “A bit steep, that.”

Hawke was too busy calculating the odds to reply. There was open ground all the way around this side of the house. It was perhaps a hundred yards to the covered entranceway at the front door. But he could circle around through the woods. Maybe the house was closer to the tree line around the back. He pulled the Walther from its holster, checked that there was a full mag and a round in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a weapon against sharpshooters with SDV sniper rifles. But then, what the hell were you going to do? Life was seldom perfect.

“Time?” Hawke asked.

“Fifteen.”

“A bloody lifetime,” Hawke said. “I’m going inside that house and bring her out.”

“That’s insanity! It’s wide-open ground for at least a hundred yards on all four sides of the house. Bloody suicide with those sharpshooters up there, Alex. Use your head, man!”

But Halter saw a look in the man’s cold blue eyes that told him any argument was a waste of precious time. He slipped out of his fur coat, spread it out on the snow, and placed the machine carefully on top of it. With practiced fingers, he knelt on the bearskin, opened the Beta, and booted it up. Then he flipped an illuminated red toggle, arming the unit.

“Do what you have to do, Stefan. I’d do the same in your shoes. But I’m going inside that house now. I’ll get her out. Or I won’t. If I’m not back in ten minutes, with or without Anastasia, blow the whole damn house down. Kill the madman and everyone else inside. A million lives are at stake. It doesn’t matter who dies in there to prevent that.”

“Alex, listen, it’s bloody over. I’m sorry about your friend in there. But you can’t help her now. You won’t get twenty feet across that open ground. They’ve got night-vision equipment. I can’t even give you covering fire with the Bizon, because they’d take me out before I triggered the detonator. Christ, just wait until he boards. We’ll take him out when the ship’s over the fjord. I’m just sorry as hell, but that’s the end of it.”

“I have no choice, Stefan. I’d rather die out there in the snow than live the rest of my life knowing I didn’t try to save her. All right? You understand that?”

“I guess I do, Alex, God help me.”

“Good enough. Give ’em hell when the time comes. Cheers, mate.”

“Cheers.”

“Here goes nothing,” Hawke said with a smile, and then he was on his feet and running across the impossibly broad expanse of moonlit snow, head down, arms and legs pumping, the covered entryway to house only sixty or so yards away now…

He almost made it.

Shots rang out, three or four bursts of them, heavy automatic-weapons fire from the roof. There were little geysers of snow erupting all around the running and spinning Englishman. He dodged and darted, keeping his head down, sprinting like a madman, desperately zigzagging for the safety of the entryway.

The first round caught Hawke in the right shoulder and spun him completely around. Halter, watching his new friend from just inside the tree line, found the shocking sight of his red-black blood spraying voluminously over the white snow horrifying. But Hawke managed somehow to keep his feet beneath him and keep moving toward the house. Another round caught him in the left thigh, and he spun again, his left knee barely grazing the snow before he rose again and limped forward, dragging his wounded leg through the crusty snow.

Halter watched him raise the little Walther and fire at the men above who were killing him, even as yet another and another round struck him, and he collapsed to the ground. Hawke lay there, motionless, gazing up at the stars, small snow geysers erupting all around him, some missing, some of them no doubt finding their target. Halter checked his watch and looked down at the machine.

Then his eyes returned to his comrade, alone out on the snow, gravely wounded, surely dying.

He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes. Was that time enough to run out there and try to drag Hawke back to the safety of the woods? And still take out the Tsar before he used his own Beta machine to kill a million people? Maybe just enough time. But he could be shot down himself, of course, die trying to save this brave man. A man who would so willingly, so cheerfully, sacrifice his own life to save the woman he loved.

It would be a death well worth dying, he thought, trying to save the life of a man as noble as this one. Yes, he could comfortably live, or die, with that.

Or he could sit safely in the woods as Hawke died, bled to death out there on the snow, knowing that by staying put, he was perhaps saving the lives of a million souls. It was what Hawke had wanted him to do. What he’d told him to do, in fact. But if he did that, was he any more worthy than the monster they’d both vowed to kill? If he wasn’t willing at least to try to save Hawke’s life, what made him one iota better than his avowed enemy?

Bugger all, he thought, seeing Hawke’s inert body twitch as another round struck home. He might actually succeed, after all, he told himself. Save Hawke and still pull the Beta trigger in time.

It would be a very close thing.

Professor Stefanovich Halter had a decision to make.

HAWKE WAS ALIVE, for the moment, anyway. But he knew he was not far from death. Blood was pumping out of him from too many places. A gentle snow had begun to fall. He closed his eyes. The snowflakes felt like butterfly wings grazing his cheeks. He knew he’d failed. But he also knew he’d tried. And so it would end. He’d done his duty. There was nothing left to think or say. It was, finally, over.

THE SCREAMS FROM the third-floor bedroom could be heard throughout the house. The elderly Swedish servants paused and looked at each other, shook their heads, and went on about their duties. They were long accustomed to these horrible cries.

Every summer, they would come to Morto, the widowed count, his beautiful daughter, and the twin boys. And over the course of every summer, since her childhood, the father had found reason to beat his daughter. Beat her when he was angry. Or depressed. Or had swilled too much vodka after supper. Beat her and whipped her so badly