Page 81 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“More than you know,” she replied with anger.
—
Balka nodded to Hanzi ashe walked past the panel truck’s cab. He opened the rear door and crawled inside. He had hooked up the transmitter to a truck battery and attached it to an aerial that poked out through a hole drilled into the van’s roof.The top of the antenna had been clamped to the third story of a fire escape in the alley where Hanzi had parked. Light came from a lamp attached to a second, smaller battery.
He had practiced diligently with the telegraph arm that sent messages over the airwaves, but he hadn’t developed much proficiency. He didn’t have what amateur radio enthusiasts called “fist.”
With slow deliberation he tapped out instructions to his brother some miles distant on the bridge of a stolen battleship. They didn’t use any fancy codes, but just a simple straightforward set of instructions.Three Blocks East One Block South. That would put the first of several shells through the roof of the vital Pennsylvania Station.
Balka yanked on the antenna wire sticking through the van’s roof to pull it free from the metal fire escape and drew its full length into the van’s body. Once it was secure, he rapped on the bulkhead separating the cab from the cargo area.
The truck’s engine had been idling. Hanzi put his van in gear and drove them away from the curb. He had told Balka that it was possible for a radio transmission to be tracked back to its source. While unlikely that someone who heard the open-air broadcast would inform the police, it was a smart move to relocate after each time he called to the ship.
Of course he’d seen the bodies and had arrived at the blast zone in time to hear one of the victim’s wails of agony go silent when she died. His brain wasn’t wired for him to care. That they’d died, that anyone died, didn’t register to him the way it did to any other human being. Someone was alive and then they were not. It was that simple to him.
His brother, Karl, could feel sympathy. Pain and loss motivated him. But not Balka. He knew how to make the appropriate expressions and say the right things, but his heart remained unmoved. Henever understood grief because he never really understood loss. When he was a boy and was told his parents were dead, he’d kept sharpening the little knife Karl had given him without pause.
Traffic remained a snarled mess. Hanzi used the van’s fender to exploit any advantage in order to get out of the area. A block away from where they’d parked, cars began to move in a more orderly fashion. It was still crawling, but at least there were no abandoned vehicles blocking their path.
A clap like thunder shook the city once again, followed seconds later by an eleven-inch naval projectile falling from the sky. Balka expected it to land almost seven blocks from where they were. Instead it hit close enough to rock the van on its suspension as it exploded in the iron skeleton of a nearby ten-story building under construction.
Rath had been thrown to the floor by the concussion. He got to his knees and pushed open the van’s doors in time to see girders beginning to rain from the sky as the building began to collapse. Pedestrians were screaming, construction workers were trying to flee the fenced-off lot. The sound of collapsing steel was a combination of roaring destruction and the ringing clang of metal careening off metal. The building folded in on itself, pancaking into a thirty-foot-tall tangle of bent steel and dead workers shrouded in a veil of concrete dust that billowed for several blocks.
Balka lost a full minute staring at the devastation and listening to the screams of trapped and dying men. He finally roused himself. He leapt from the van and raced up to Hanzi, who was leaning out the driver’s side window, his mouth agape.
“This is a disaster,” Balka said.
“I’ll say,” Hanzi replied, still eyeing the wreck that had once been the bones of a skyscraper.
“No, you idiot. Karl missed by at least half a mile. I don’t know what went wrong but we have to warn him before he fires again. Find us a place to put up the antenna.” He ran back into the cargo bed and slammed the doors shut.
Hanzi made no pretense of his intentions to leave the area. He used his truck’s powerful engine to push aside a smaller car and did it a second time when the driver wouldn’t pull to the curb as he stood on the street, his Ford’s door open at his side. The man cursed at Hanzi as he drove by. The Roma threw him a rude hand gesture and ground his way down the block.
They turned down a tree-lined side street and found an alley much like where they’d parked before. Balka shoved several feet of the antenna wire out through the roof, enough for Hanzi to grab a handful and begin to climb a fire escape. He wasn’t halfway up when another shell streaked over the city from the north and detonated less than fifteen feet from the ruins of the building the ship had already leveled.
The explosion destroyed a storage shed but by this time all the workers who’d survived the initial blast had evacuated the construction site.
While Hanzi clamped the aerial to a fire escape railing, Balka calculated how far off his brother’s shots were landing. He tapped out,Both Landed Eight Blocks East Three Blocks South.
Karl had two sets of coordinates and would now figure out the proper targeting. Rush hour was winding down, but there would be enough people at the train station to make this the greatest tragedy since the paddle steamerGeneral Slocumsank in the East River, killing more than a thousand people.
42
Captain Grimm coaxed everything hecould out of theAlice N. Her engine was revved to just below its redline, making a deafening racket while smoke boiled out of her skinny funnel. Whoever had tuned the motor early this morning knew what he was doing. Bell estimated he’d wrung an extra two knots from the tired old fishing boat.
Bell had changed clothing and was now on deck with Joe, checking over the weapons and gear.
“You sure about that gun, Isaac?” Grey asked. “It’s the oddest-looking thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You should see the guy who designed it. Khristofor Ovlovey. Master mechanic, machinist, and gunsmith who lives on a farm on Long Island. This is his answer to trench warfare. Semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun with a folding metal stock and a ten-round box magazine that feeds from the side.”
“Why not the bottom?”
“Without a long clip hanging under the receiver, a shooter can hunker a little lower in a trench while firing. It increases his chance of surviving. This type of weapon also makes anyone using it far deadlier than an ordinary rifleman. This beast can lay down nearly a hundred man-stopping pellets in about fifteen seconds.”
“Nasty. Has he sold the design?”
“No takers. To make it reliable, the tolerances need to be very precise. That makes the gun horribly expensive to manufacture. Khris has made a lot of one-off items for the agency over the years. He thought of me for this gun when he knew he’d never get to make a second one.”
