The La Maquinista engine disappeared into the breach of the EM Accelerator.
"Clear the launch area," Colonel Intifadah ordered. Al-Mudir repeated the order.
The staff retreated to the console.
Colonel Intifadah turned to Koldunov and said, "Now it is up to you."
"I will go and seal the Accelerator if you insist upon going through with this," Koldunov told him unhappily.
"I will accompany you."
"That is not necessary."
"But I insist," Colonel Intifadah returned, smiling oilily. Koldunov hesitated.
"As you wish," he said finally. Koldunov exited the console room and walked to the hatch keypad. Colonel Intifadah peered over his shoulder. Koldunov moved to the left and tapped the first number. Colonel Intifadah shifted to the right.
Koldunov hit the second and third numbers quickly, shifted again, and hit the remaining numbers. The hatch rolled into place like a fire door.
"Excellent," said Colonel Intifadah. His smile was very large, very knowing. The Colonel put his arm around Koldunov and started to lead him back to the console.
Involuntarily Koldunov clenched his fists at the Lobynian's touch. He felt wetness in his right hand. He looked down. There was a smear of green on the palm of his hand. His index finger pad was also green. The finger he had used to enter the code.
Koldunov looked back at the keypad. With horror, he saw that the keys he had pressed were green too. The sukin syn had placed an invisible chemical on the keypad. Obviously he had made a mental note of which keys had been pressed. But he did not know the exact combination. Nor did he have the code to unseal the hatch.
Koldunov smiled back. He would not be tricked like that again.
In the control room, Koldunov started the powering-up sequence. The bright underground lights dimmed. The EM Accelerator drew enormous power. From past experience, Koldunov knew that lights were dimming all over Lobynia's few cities, which dotted the Mediterranean coast. The first launch had blacked out Dapoli for two days.
"Power nominal," Al-Mudir told him.
Colonel Intifadah licked his thick lips in anticipation. "Setting inclination angle," Koldunov said mechanically. He punched in a set of numbers and pulled a rubberhandled grip.
Behind the thick hatch came a monstrous grinding of gears and motors. The EM Accelerator had been built under the sand with its muzzle aimed toward America. Like a giant mortar, the pitch of the barrel determined where its projectiles would land.
When the grinding ceased, the great barrel was positioned according to preset coordinates.
"Countdown," Koldunov called.
Al-Mudir began with ten. He counted down to four, skipped three-apparently because he was unfamiliar with the number-and when he got to zero, Colonel intifadah shouted:
"Launch!"
With a grim expression, Pyotr Koldunov flipped up the red protector over the ignition button and depressed it with a heavy thumb.
The lights dimmed further. The air was chill with electrical tension. Every man in the control booth felt the hair on his body lift. Bitter ozone filled their noses.
A sound came from the EM Accelerator. Even muffled by the sealed breech, it was loud. It was a sharp screech of metal like a steel god in anguish. Koldunov placed his hands over his ears to block it out. In his mind, it was a predecessor of the screaming of a thousand U. S. souls who were about to be extinguished in a single brutal blow.
The La Maquinista locomotive sat in the darkness barely a minute.
Its blunt nose pointed up the long tunnel. Then the far end opened and searing sunlight bathed the gleaming monster.
Suddenly electricity crackled along the power rails. Blue lightning spat off their copper surfaces. The rails charged, their opposing polarities took hold of the 204-ton engine. And from an inert start, the locomotive went from zero to twenty thousand miles an hour as the howling magnetic field expelled it from the barrel.
The locomotive emerged from the EM Accelerator at a steep angle. It went up so fast that had there been any bedouins in this remote area of the Lobynian Desert to watch it, they would have seen the locomotive as a blurred shadow passing before the sun.
The concrete hatch that covered the outside end of the Accelerator slid back into place after the locomotive had cleared it. The hatch was painted the color of the shifting red sands so that no spy satellite could read it.
The locomotive shot up like a beam of light, its eight wheels spinning so fast the drive rods jerked in a frenzy of articulated motion. It reached the top of its arc over the Atlantic Ocean, where it slowed as gravity began to pull it to earth. The leading edges of the vehicle began to redden with heat. Smoke spurted from some of the thinner surface pipes and they vaporized from the heat of reentry. Other components, more heat-resistant, tore free. The entire engine strained at every rivet. It was traveling faster than its designer had ever dreamed, faster than the stresses of atmospheric flight which threatened to tear it apart. Down, down the locomotive fell, its twin buffers glowing like fiery fists.
The Magnus Building was lucky.
It only lost the upper six stories as the La Maquinista struck it at a shallow angle.
But the North Am complex stood directly behind it. The engine had mashed into a ball of metal going through the Magnus Building. When it struck the eighth floor of the North Am complex, the building's three towers shuddered for a fantastic second. Then the North Am complex exploded outward in a glittering mosaic of blue glass, concrete, and steel girders. The debris that did not rain all over the surrounding streets fell onto the bottom stories, pulverizing them.
Windows shattered for six blocks in all directions. Cars in the street were beaten into submission. They collided like bumper cars, careening off light posts and clots of pedestrians.
Oddly, there was silence ten minutes after the last explosive sound. A cloud of brownish-gray dust hovered over the area.
Then someone coughed.
It was as if the single human sound reminded the survivors that they, too, lived. A woman cried. A man sobbed. Someone, discovering a loved one dead, sent up a scream of soul-tortured anguish.
Then the first siren wailed. And from that point on the survivors made every human sound imaginable.
Remo and Chiun arrived in the middle of the second hour.
By then fires blazed in the ruins of the two skyscrapers. And in the streets, every fire hydrant for six blocks had been opened, as if flooding the streets might help. Fire hoses played on the fires. Other hoses sent streams up into the cold air. The firemen were trying to cut the dust that hampered breathing and made all rescue attempts impossible.
"Looks like an earthquake," Remo said, surveying the damage from behind police barricades.
"This is a terrible thing," Chiun agreed.
"Someone will pay for this," Remo vowed.
"Indeed. When I assure an emperor that there is no danger, I expect it to be so."
"Forget your image. We gotta do something."
"I fear everyone within the zone of death is beyond our help."
"Let's find out," Remo said, vaulting the barrier.
A well-meaning policeman attempted to keep Remo back.