The Destroyer - 63 - The Destroyer 063 - The Sky is Falling by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

Author:Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir [Murphy, Warren & Sapir, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Action
Publisher: PINNACLE BOOKS
Published: 2010-03-19T14:52:56+00:00

Chapter 9

For the last fifty miles the roads were ice and rock and a vague out­line that some oth­er ve­hi­cle had been there be­fore. That was called a road. Up ahead on the map, where Colonel Se­my­on Petro­vich was lead­ing the com­mand, were no roads.

Be­hind him were enough hy­dro­gen war­heads to in­cin­er­ate the en­tire Yakut re­gion of Siberia and ir­ra­di­ate Mon­go­lia as well. What ab­so­lute­ly ter­ri­fied this mis­sile of­fi­cer lead­ing the eighty-​sev­en-​truck con­voy for the four-​mis­sile bat­tery were the mis­siles them­selves. He had nev­er been near mis­siles like these, and had been as­sured that Rus­sia would nev­er build them, for “the safe­ty of mankind.” The prob­lem with these “burn­ing hells,” as he made ev­ery one of his men call them, was they could go off right here, right be­hind him, right in the mid­dle of Siberia, leav­ing a crater the size of two Leningrads. The road, what there was of it, was colos­sal­ly bumpy, and the war­head had come out of the fac­to­ry armed, a lu­na­cy nev­er be­fore heard of in atom­ic weapons. Even the Amer­icans with the first atom­ic bomb did not arm it un­til the air­plane car­ry­ing it was near the tar­get. You did not arm the weapon un­til just be­fore fir­ing. Ev­ery­one knew that. And now all Rus­sia had gone mad.

This mad­ness, this strange new mis­sile he and ev­ery of­fi­cer had once been promised Rus­sia would nev­er build, was all over Rus­sia. It would be mass mur­der, not war. He would mur­der mil­lions with­out even the flim­si­est ex­cuse. There could be no ex­cuse for the mad­ness he was now so care­ful­ly try­ing to guide to its new base in Siberia.

It had start­ed just a few days be­fore. In his apart­ment at Sara­tov, a cen­tral farm­ing city south­west of Moscow, Petro­vich had re­ceived the first strange word. He had just fin­ished wait­ing in line for a fresh batch of writ­ing pa­per for his grand­child. He had re­tired the year be­fore, and get­ting fresh pa­per had al­ways been dif­fi­cult when he no longer had ac­cess to mil­itary sup­plles. His wife was wait­ing in the apart­ment with a block lead­er of the par­ty who had not even tak­en off his coat, but stood with his hat tap­ping his side and his feet tap­ping the floor.

“His tele­phone has been ring­ing all day,” said the re­tired colonel’s wife, a round, sweet-​faced wom­an. “Your com­mand has called us­ing my tele­phone,” said the block lead­er.

“They could not phone me, of course,” said Petro­vich, who had ap­plied for a tele­phone in 1958.

“There are oth­er phones they could have used, but this is an emer­gen­cy. You are to re­port to Even­ki im­me­di­ate­ly. You have top pri­or­ity on any air­craft in the area, any car to get you to the air­craft, any tele­phone line at your ser­vice.”

“Are you sure, me? What would they want an old man for?”

“They want you. Now.”

“Is there a war? Where is there a war?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know who is run­ning Moth­er Rus­sia any­more. That they would rude­ly in­struct a par­ty mem­ber to act as a mes­sen­ger is ob­scene.

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