Paige put a finger up to her lip and shook her head. “You’ve come far enough, Anika.”
The gunfire slowed, and Anika watched Peary volunteers in a wide assortment of winter jackets keeping low, advancing over the snow, dodging around the metallic forest of pylons underneath everything.
Three and a half minutes passed in what felt like a handful of held breaths in between pauses in the gunfire, and then the attack began. Anika left the cover of the pylons to watch.
Gaia Security used clear bulletproof riot shields to protect themselves as they stormed up stairs. Door rams were deployed, and after three swings, the doors crumpled back.
Men and women poured inside, and the sound of gunfire increased. A full-on fusillade of distant firecracker pops of varying tones and frequencies, shouts, and more door cracking.
And much like popcorn, after a while, it slowed down. An occasional shot sounded, randomly. Then quiet.
Roo started walking toward the building.
“Mr. Jones,” Paige said sharply.
But he ignored her and kept walking. Anika stood up and jogged after him, and Vy joined them.
“They didn’t have a chance to fire it,” Anika said. “Right?” She hadn’t seen anything. She’d been looking for that flash of smoke, the contrail of a missile, or a rocket, or whatever it was.
But all there had been was gunfire.
“Right?” she repeated.
36
They ran up the stairs, boots clanging on metal, and rounded the doors. A body lay at the foot of steps that led up to the next level, blood continuing to expand out in a steaming dark pool.
In the corridor that ran past the steps, three men sat against the wall as one of the Gaia men checked their wounds.
“Up,” Roo said.
They stepped carefully over the dead man and ran up, with Paige not far behind.
Two flights of stairs, three more bodies, including one Peary volunteer being carried down the stairs in a stretcher, a raggedy-doll-like hand flopping over the edge.
Had the price been worth it? Or had more people died in vain?
The top floor was dominated by a skylight and ruined walls. They’d been knocked out by sledgehammer. A hastily boarded up gap covered in a blue tarp in the side of one major wall allowed chilled air into the entire upper floor.
In the center of the mess, Anika saw more dead men from both sides sprawled around. But it was the center of the room that drew her attention. There was a muddy white missile, with a fat, red-tipped nose, pointed skyward in the middle of the room. The tip of the missile was just a foot away from the glass of the skylight, fifteen feet above the overly open-spaced third floor. It sat in a hastily constructed cradle of two-by-four timbers that raised it up into launch position. A crude wooden crane had been constructed out of more wooden planks to pull the missile up into position.
A glance out through a small hole in the tarp showed that no one had noticed the missile being cranked up because this side of the house was hemmed in by a large water tower and several more industrial-looking buildings, most likely automated small-scale factories.
Anika turned around.
So here it was.
A fucking, honest-to-goodness, nuclear missile.
They all gathered around it, like mystics around some obelisk.
“Did it get armed, is it going to launch?” Paige asked a grizzled-looking man sitting near a laptop and table filled cables leading back to the missile.
“
Paige turned back to look up at the missile. “It’s not really that big, is it?” she said, wonderingly.
“All it had to do was knock out the shield with the electromagnetic pulse,” Roo said. “It didn’t need to be.”
“We’re safe for now,” Paige said, visible relief on her face. “We stopped them.”
Anika felt her legs weaken a bit. It was from relief, as well. She’d been carrying tension since she stepped foot in Thule, imagining that, at any second, a flash would be the last thing she saw before some detonation just above her.
That was ridiculous, they now knew for sure. This missile looked like it would climb fairly high. Its job was to get above the shield and then detonate. It wasn’t a terrorist’s device, intended to destroy people and civilians on the Arctic ground.
Vy had grabbed her gloved hand and squeezed it really hard. “Jesus, Anika. It’s over. We got it.”
“You’re damn right we got it,” Paige said. “Come on. Yuri’s a Russian military ordnance specialist, he’ll work with some contractors by phone to make sure it’s turned off properly. We’re going to head back to HQ. I want to talk to Ivan about what we do next, but I also want to make sure we take care of you guys for helping us out.”
“I need tickets. Anika and I need to get out of the area,” Vy said.
There was a weary satisfaction in the air on the drive back. Paige, in particular, leaned back against the seat with a private smile on her face.
“Now we only have one big problem to face,” she said.
“The blockade.” That was still a massive problem, Anika thought. And she didn’t want to be in Thule as all that continued to play out. The retreating demesnes probably had the right idea.
“Yes.”
Back at the top of the elevator they were waved through security. Anika noticed Roo frown. “What?” she asked him in a quick whisper.
“Look at the submachine guns,” he whispered back.
The men had them slung over their shoulders, at the ready, even though they were standing behind the desk.
“They weren’t doing that earlier, the guns were out of sight.”
Roo nodded, and Anika really wished she’d slipped something past security. A knife would do.
Down the elevators, back into the Gaia complex’s heart, then across to the conference room, where an ebullient Ivan Cohen waited with a twenty-person retinue of dark-suited, older men from a variety of countries.
Something didn’t quite feel right, though. They looked nervous. Eyes on the ground, shuffling. They did not look like the normal boardroom of a trillion-dollar corporation.
Then again, what did Anika know about what these sorts of people
Certainly, she felt it shouldn’t be like nervous servants, waiting for their employer to find something wrong with their work.
There was champagne on the tables. Ivan passed a glass over to Paige. “We’ve stopped them from destroying the most important public engineering project of this century,” he said. His eyes were wide, almost dilated. Flushed with success, Anika thought. “Congratulations.”
Paige set the slender glass down on the table. “Ivan, we still have a problem.…”
Ivan shook his head. “I took care of it.”
Feet shuffled throughout the room. They were like nervous birds, feathers ruffling as they were disturbed.
Anika was getting a bad feeling.
“Ivan, what do you mean by that?” Paige asked slowly and calmly, as if he were a child.
He waved at all the board members. “They all finally grew a pair—collectively, that is. They came down here
