Chapter Thirty

May 8

Dominique woke up hoping it was all a bad dream.

But as soon as she saw the unfinished, plaster-patched ceiling above her bed and the MOP painter’s cans and brushes and tarps in the corner, she knew it wasn’t so.

“When will they get this room done?” she thought out loud. She had to admit she liked 30 Rock much better than Tower Two of the World Trade Center.

What hadn’t been a dream but seemed like one was still fresh in her mind; sleep could not erase a moment of it. Flying out to the carrier in the storm, the battle to get on and then off the ship. Grabbing the Magilla.

Seeing Hawk. …

Punching Hawk.

Her hand still hurt from hitting him.

She studied the splotches of white paint over her head again and thought, How can I expect anyone to understand all this when I can barely understand it myself?

That was her daily morning prayer.

She slipped out of the bed and showered, methodically scrubbing herself up and down.

Toweling off, she prepared herself mentally before walking back out. Although she’d been asleep some of the time—and pretending to be asleep for a lot more—she and Zmeya hadn’t talked much since returning from the hellish trip out to sea.

He was supremely pissed off about what had happened to Convoy 56. But his successful retrieval of the special box he referred to as the Magilla seemed a bit of a balm to him. She’d heard him on the radiophone several times, basically saying that as long as they had the Magilla, they could live without everything else.

He had not said one word to her about his brother or what he’d done to him. She could still hear the horrible screaming; it echoed in her ears. At the time, Zmeya had mumbled that one more person would have overloaded the copter and doomed them all. But that was it.

Of course, she didn’t mention her encounter with Hunter at the bottom of the ship.

That she would have to take to the grave.

She walked into the living area to find Zmeya at his desk looking out on the city as usual.

His aide-de-camp was there, updating him on the NKVD’s relocation to its new headquarters at the WTC.

“Per your orders, about eighty percent of our people are here and in place,” the man reported. “That includes all our field officers, as you requested. They are now populating the midlevel floors here in Tower Two, the spaces MOP had been working on before … the trouble started.”

“Building security is in place?” Zmeya asked. “Inside and out.”

“Again, exactly per your orders,” the aide said, adding, “It won’t be like 30 Rock. We won’t be trapped if anything goes wrong. We’ll have a way out. A secure way out. On the other hand, it will be very hard for any interlopers to go anywhere in this building if they don’t know how our security is wired up.”

He hesitated a moment then asked Zmeya, “Do you want the latest dead and missing figures from the fire inside 30 Rock? One of the CRPP members is among the missing.”

The aide was sure this would give Zmeya pause; the members of the Committee of the Revolution for the Protection of the People were the closest Zmeya had to friends. But the commissar just waved him off.

“Next. …” he said.

Dominique walked around the side of his desk and into his field of vision. Off in a side room was the bright yellow box containing the mysterious Magilla. Zmeya was wearing its activation key attached to a chain around his neck.

He looked up at her and realized she was wearing nothing but a short silk robe. The aide was smart enough to make a hasty exit. Zmeya leaned back in his chair and turned his attention to her.

“I passed your test, didn’t I?” she asked him sweetly.

“Yes, at the expense of five of my best gunmen,” he replied with bemusement.

“I told you they panicked,” she explained. “They got spooked by something and started shooting in the dark. It was unavoidable that they all hit one another.”

“Five perfect shots, one each to the forehead?” he said with a cruel laugh. “My kingdom for some truth serum!”

She sat on his desk, very close to him, and pulled up her robe so he could see all of her bare legs.

“But I did what you wanted me to do,” she insisted softly. “Wasn’t that the whole point? Others came and retrieved the box, but you entrusted me to get the key. And without that key, the Magilla is useless, right? I had a chance to get away with it—especially when I was left alone after those boobs all shot each other. But I came back to you with it. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Before he could reply, his radiophone rang. He shooed her off the desk.

He listened to the phone for a few seconds, and then his face went red. He immediately turned on the AM radio on his desk.

It came on in the middle of a Red Radio News broadcast, but not a typical one. Speaking in English, a person was saying that the firebombing of the MMZ was an NKVD plot so they could take over the Okupatsi from the military.

“Look at the facts, Comrades,” the mysterious speaker said. “Thousands of our military brothers died in the fires. Thousands more were injured and burned. Our four military headquarters buildings were destroyed. A large part of the MMZ was wiped out. It will take us years to recover.

“Meanwhile, the NKVD has moved into the two tallest buildings in the world, as if nothing has happened. They had everything to gain by staging the firebombing and manufacturing this crisis. So listen up, all loyal soldiers and sailors of Mother Russia. Think about it for just a few minutes, Comrades, and you’ll figure it out. The NKVD are the ones who firebombed the MMZ.”

Zmeya was absolutely livid.

“Goddamn lies,” he seethed, the volcano rumbling. “That’s not how it is at all. …”

He was quickly on the radiophone again. “Bomb that radio station if you have to, but I want it off the air now! And then collect those three idiots with all the medals. I think they need a little reeducation when it comes to their communications skills.”

Dominique watched his face turn crimson while his eyes went absolutely black and searing. In another instance, she might have urged him to take his meds.

But not now.

Instead, she went back to her unfinished bedroom and locked the door.

The black Cadillac pulled up to the temporary hospital on the corner of Park Avenue and East Fifty-Eigth Street, stopping with a screech.

Four men in black coats, dark glasses, and fedoras got out and barged through the front door, brushing aside two army guards.

There were close to a thousand patients in the hospital, all of them injured in the firestorm. The NKVD was looking for one of them.

All activity inside the building’s lobby came to a stop when they walked in. One was carrying a red striped pouch.

The head nurse greeted them nervously. One man spoke for the four. “You know who we are?”

The trembling nurse nodded twice.

“We are looking for this man,” he said, holding up a photo for her. “His name is Colonel Sergei Gagarin, Russian Army.”

The nurse checked a haphazard box of files then dialed a number on the nursing station’s radiophone. It was a short conversation.

“Room thirteen,” she told the men. “Down the hall to your left. I just talked to him. He is awake and waiting for you.”

Nurses, patients, and doctors cleared a path for the four men as they walked down the corridor. They got to Room 13 and without bothering to knock let themselves in.

But the room was empty.

Gagarin was not there; his belongings were gone as well.

The only movement came from the curtains, which rustled in the breeze coming through the open window.

The large green helicopter circled the secret base in the Pine Barrens twice before coming in for a landing.

It was a Mi-8 Hip, a cargo-carrier by design, and was still wearing its Russian red-star markings, camo, and tail number.

The people below melted into the pines at the first sight of it. The woods were haunted; they all knew that by now. But at this point, no precaution was a stupid one.

Completely spooked, the Cobra brothers waited in the trees about thirty feet from the runway. Others had arrived after them. The JAWS team was here. Jim Cook, Clancy Miller, Shawn Higgens, Mark Snyder, Warren Maas, and Neil Luck, specialists in combat explosives who had been called sappers in the old days. Also on hand was NJ104, Frank Geraci’s crew. They were a special ops group that had evolved from the 104th Battalion, New Jersey National Guard, and after the Big War, they’d specialized in all aspects of urban warfare.

Captain Crunch of the famous Ace Wrecking Company fighter-bomber team; Louie St. Louis from Football City; JT “Socket” Toomey and Ben Wa, two of the country’s top fighter pilots; Colonel Don Kurjan from the United American Army; and Catfish Johnson of the Righteous Brothers Special Ops group—they were all here. All the people Dozer had tried so hard to contact for so long. They were all answering the rallying cry to fight back against the Red occupiers of New York City.

But if this was going to be like other adventures they’d had in the past, it was already off to a disastrous start.

The Mi-8 Hip copter bounced in. The arrival of the Russian aircraft was surprising enough for the men hiding in the woods, but even more surprising was seeing Hawk Hunter climb out of it.

He was ragged-looking, unshaven, his uniform still wet from the adventure on the Isakov earlier. After what had happened on the carrier, especially being knocked out by Dominique at the bottom of the boat, and then the strange ending to the sea battle, he was running purely on adrenaline and nothing else. Everything still seemed surreal.

Only St. Louie, Ben, and JT had seen Hunter since his return, so there were a lot of bro-hugs all around. But they had to be quick, because Hunter knew something was wrong here.

The Cobra Brothers finally walked him over to the grisly drawing left in the middle of the runway. Before Hunter could even ask where the base’s personnel were, they pointed to a drainage ditch nearby.

It was filled with bound and gagged bodies. All their throats had been cut.

“Five 7CAV guys,” Phil Cobra told Hunter. “Twenty civilian techs. …”

Minutes passed with Hunter unable to speak. He’d flown here expecting the base to be business as usual, to see his friends and allies.

Instead, he found this. …

He returned to the morbid bloody drawing on the runway. He recalled the Trashman talking about an NKVD officer with a brutal facial scar executing homeless New Yorkers in the middle of the street. The bloody image on the tarmac reminded Hunter of what he thought that man looked like.

But he just didn’t know what to say. He was still reeling from the hideous slaughter.

“The Reds know we’re here,” he said at last. “But we still have to bury our men. …”

Both Cobras nodded grimly.

“We’ve already found some shovels,” Phil said.

The job was done in just ten awful minutes, everyone chipping in to dig a hole next to the ditch and then lay the dead in it with as much dignity as possible.

St. Louis led a quick prayer. The grimness of the moment was almost overwhelming, especially for Hunter. He was the one who would have to tell Dozer.

Two seconds after the last shovel full of dirt was thrown on the mass grave, there came an earsplitting roar. Three rockets trailing smoke and flame went right over their heads. They crashed about a mile away, causing an explosion that shook the ground beneath their feet. No sooner had that sound faded away than three more rockets screamed overhead.

“Those are BM-30 Rockets,” St. Louis said, coolly lighting a cigarette. “Long range, usually very accurate.”

These three rockets exploded only a half mile from the base. They were zeroing in on them. That was enough for Hunter.

“Time to go,” he said.

No one needed any prompting. They all scrambled aboard the Russian-built copter as Hunter rushed to get the rotors spinning and the Cobra Brothers flicked on all the systems needed for flight. They’d all fought Russian choppers in the past, but none of them had ever been inside one. It was big and thick and heavily armored, more like a flying tank.

Following his instincts, Hunter pulled up on the collective even before all his control lights were green.

They lifted off and went straight up through the open camo cover.

A fifteen-rocket barrage landed on the base just a few seconds later. The combined explosions actually pushed the helicopter up faster than its own engines, spinning it crazily. Only with the Cobras’ help did Hunter get the Mi-20 under control.

Those aboard looked down at the base and saw flames enveloping it, with more rockets landing every few seconds.

They all knew there was a plan afoot to attack the Reds in New York City. But the Mi-8 Hip aside, they also knew such an attack was going to be a huge undertaking.

“Were you guys planning to run this mission from here, from the haunted forest?” Phil Cobra asked Hunter.

The Wingman shook his head no.

“We moved the HQ yesterday,” he said sadly. “I just wish we’d been able to do it sooner.”

He circled the base one more time, allowing those on board to give a final salute to their fallen brethren.

Then he turned the copter northeast and pushed the throttles to full power.