She was using the narrow vehicular access road; she had to, for the fields all around were mined and set with trip-wires. She tried to walk light and easy, casual, but there was that in her movements which spoke of stealth. She must have booked out, presumably on the pretext of being unable to sleep. Or maybe she really couldn't sleep, was simply out for a walk and a little night air. Gerenko snorted. Oh, indeed? A long walk, presumably — probably right to Leonid Brezhnev himself, in Moscow!
He hurried down the winding stone stairs, took the key to his duty vehicle from the watchkeeper at the door, and set off in pursuit. Overhead, to the west, the lights of a helicopter signalled its approach: Theo Dolgikh, hopefully with a good excuse for the mess he'd earlier hinted at on the phone!
Two-thirds of the way to the massive perimeter wall that surrounded the entire grounds, Gerenko caught up with the girl, pulled up alongside and slowed to a halt. She smiled, shielded her eyes from the dazzle of the headlights — then saw who was hunched behind the wheel. Her smile died on her face.
Gerenko slid open his window. ‘Going somewhere, Fraulein Föener, my dear?' he said. .
Ten minutes earlier Harry had stepped out of the Möbius continuum into one of the Château's pillbox gun emplacements. He'd been there before and knew the exact locations of all six, and guessed that they'd only be manned in the event of an alert. Since that might well be the current state of readiness if Kyle's absence had been discovered, he carried a loaded automatic pistol in the pocket of an overcoat he'd stolen from a peg in the ordnance dump in Kolomyya.
Across his shoulders he bore the weight of a bulky sausage-shaped bag that weighed all of one hundred pounds. Putting it down, he unzipped it and took out the first of a dozen gauze-wrapped cheeses: that was how he thought of the stuff, like soft grey cheese, except it smelled a lot worse. He moulded the ultra-high-explosive plastic over a sealed ammunition box, stuck in a timer-detonator and set the explosion for ten minutes' time. This had taken him maybe thirty seconds; he couldn't be sure for he had no watch. Then he moved on to the next pillbox, where this time he set the detonation for nine minutes, and so on.
Less than five minutes later he began to repeat the process inside the Château itself. First he went to the mind-lab, where he materialised beside the operating table. It seemed strange that he (yes, he, now) had been lying on that table something less than three-quarters of an hour ago! Sweating, he stuffed UHEP into the gap between two of the filthy machines they'd used to drain Kyle's mind, set the detonator, picked up his much lighter bag and stepped through a Möbius door.
Emerging into a corridor in the accommodation area, he met face to face with a security guard doing his rounds! The man looked tired, shoulders drooping where he ambled down the corridor for the fifth time that night. Then he looked up and saw Harry, and his hand went straight for the gun at his hip.
Harry didn't know how his new body would react to physical violence; this was when he'd find out. He'd learned his stuff long ago from ‘one of the first friends he'd ever made among the dead: ‘Sergeant' Graham Lane, an ex-Army PT instructor at his old school, who'd died in a climbing accident on the beach cliffs. ‘Sergeant' had taught him a lot and Harry hadn't forgotten it.
His hand shot out and trapped the guard's hand where it snatched at the pistol, jamming it back down into its holster. At the same time he drove his knee into the man's groin and butted him in the face. The guard made some noise but not much. And then he was out like a light.
Harry set another charge right there in the corridor; but now he noticed just how badly his hands were shaking, how profusely he was sweating. He wondered how much time he had left, considered the possibility of getting caught in his own fireworks.
He made one more jump — straight into the Château's central Duty Room — and in the instant of emerging caught the Duty Officer a blow that knocked him clean out of his swivel chair. The man hadn't even had time to look up. Moulding the rest of his UHEP onto the top of the desk between the radio and a switchboard, Harry fixed a final detonator and straightened up — and looked straight down the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle!
On the other side of the raised counter, unnoticed, a young security guard had been dozing in a chair. This was obvious from his gaping mouth and dazed expression. The sound of the Duty Officer hitting the floor must have roused him. Harry didn't know how awake he was, how much he'd seen or understood, but he did know he was in big trouble. He'd only set one minute on the last' detonator!
As the guard gabbled a startled question in gasping Russian, Harry shrugged and made a sour face, pointed at a spot just behind the other. It was an old ploy, he knew, but the old ones are often the best. And sure enough it worked. The guard jerked his head that way, turned the ugly snout of his weapon, too —And when he turned back Harry was no longer there.
Which was just as well, for his ten minutes were up.
The pillboxes went up like Chinese firecrackers, blowing their concrete lids off and bursting their walls. The first explosion — the intense flash if not the blast itself, which was minimal at this distance — caused Zek Föener to stagger and cower back where she was about to climb up into Gerenko's jeep. Then the crack and rumbling roar sounded, and the earth gave the first and least of many shudders. Anti-personnel land mines, fatally disturbed in the fields around, began to go off, spouting fountains of dirt and turf. It was like a bombing raid.
‘What?' Gerenko turned in his seat and looked back, couldn't believe what he was seeing. ‘The pillboxes?' He shielded his eyes against the blaze of light.
‘Harry Keogh!' Zek breathed, but to herself.
Then the main building went; its lower walls of massive stone seemed to inhale and go on inhaling. They bowed outwards, and finally blew apart in white light and golden fire! This time Zek did feel the blast: it tossed her down on the road and stung her hands where she held them up before her face.
The Château Bronnitsy was slowly settling down into itself. A sandcastle caught in the first wave of a swelling tide, it crumbled like so much chalk. Volcanic fires burned in its guts, and spewed out through its cratered walls; and as the upper storeys and towers fell inwards, so there came secondary blasts to throw them up again. Already the Château was a total ruin, but then the big one in the Duty Room added its voice to the cacophony of destruction.
By this time Zek had managed to climb into the jeep beside Gerenko. They felt a huge fist batter at the rear of the vehicle, shove it forward; felt their ears savaged by the massive detonation, shuttered their eyes against a sudden incendiary glare. A brilliant fireball like the breath of hell turned everything to a negative photograph, blotted out the entire scene and made night into blinding day, then slowly faded and revealed the truth — that the Château Bronnitsy was no more. Bits of it, from pebbles to huge blocks of concrete, still rained to earth. Black smoke curled up across the moon; white and yellow fire seethed and roiled in the gutted ruins; a mere handful of figures stumbled about like crippled flies, trying to make their way outwards from the centre of the inferno.
Gerenko, stunned, had stalled the jeep and it wouldn't start again. Now he got out, ordered Zek out, too. The helicopter had veered sharply away as the first explosion occurred; it circled, came down and landed with a bump on the road near the perimeter wall. Theo Dolgikh spoke briefly to the pilot, climbed out and advanced at a run. Zek Föener and Gerenko made their way staggeringly towards him.