Page 76 of The Bourne Ultimatum (Jason Bourne 3)

  “Hold it,” said Benjamin, touching Jason’s arm. “Slow down.”

  “What is it?”

  “Stop,” cried the young trainer. “Pull over and shut off the engine.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not sure.” Benjamin’s neck was arched back, his eyes on the clear night sky and the shimmering lights of the stars. “No clouds,” he said cryptically. “No storms.”

  “It’s not raining, either. So what? I want to get up to the Spanish compound!”

  “There it goes again—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” And then Bourne heard it … far away, the sound of distant thunder, yet the night was clear. It happened again—and again and again, one deep rumble after another.

  “There!” shouted the young Soviet from Los Angeles, standing up in the jeep and pointing to the north. “What is it?”

  “That’s fire, young man,” answered Jason softly, hesitantly, as he also stood up and stared at the pulsating yellow glow that lit up the distant sky. “And my guess is that it’s the Spanish compound. He was initially trained there and that’s what he came back to do—to blow the place up! It’s his revenge!… Get down, we’ve got to get up there!”

  “No, you’re wrong,” broke in Benjamin, quickly lowering himself into the seat as Bourne started the engine and yanked the jeep into gear. “ ‘Spain’s’ no more than five or six miles from here. Those fires are a lot farther away.”

  “Just show me the fastest route,” said Jason, pressing the accelerator to the floor.

  Under the trainer’s swiftly roving eyes accompanied by sudden shouts of “Turn here!” and “Go right!” and “Straight down this road!” they raced through “Paris,” and north into successive sectors labeled “Marseilles,” “Montbéliard,” “Le Havre,” “Strasbourg” and so many others, circling town squares and passing quaint streets and miniaturized city blocks, until finally they were in sight of the “Spanish” border. The closer they came, the louder were the booms in the distance, the brighter the yellow night sky. The guards at the gate were furiously manning their telephones and hand-held radios; the two-note blasts of sirens joined the shouting and the screaming as police cars and fire engines appeared seemingly out of nowhere, racing into the streets of “Madrid” on their way to the next northern border crossing.

  “What’s happening?” yelled Benjamin, leaping from the jeep and dropping all pretense of Novgorod training by speaking Russian. “I’m senior staff!” he added, slipping the card into the release equipment, snapping the barrier up. “Tell me!”

  “Insanity, comrade!” shouted an officer from the gatehouse window. “Unbelievable!… It’s as if the earth went crazy! First ‘Germany,’ all over there are explosions and fires in the streets and buildings going up in flames. The ground trembles, and we are told it’s some kind of massive earthquake. Then it happens in ‘Italy’—‘Rome’ is torched, and in the ‘Greek’ sector ‘Athens’ and the port of ‘Piraeus’ are filled with fires everywhere and still the explosions continue, the streets in flames!”

  “What does Capital Headquarters say?”

  “They don’t know what to say! The earthquake nonsense was just that—nonsense. Everyone’s in panic, issuing orders and then countermanding them.” Another wall phone rang inside the gatehouse; the officer of the guard picked it up and listened, then instantly screamed at the top of his lungs. “Madness, it’s complete madness! Are you certain?”

  “What is it?” roared Benjamin, rushing to the window.

  “ ‘Egypt!’ ” he screamed, his ear pressed to the telephone. “ ‘Israel!’ … ‘Cairo’ and ‘Tel Aviv’—fires everywhere, bombs everywhere! No one can keep up with the devastation; the trucks crash into one another in the narrow streets. The hydrants are blown up; water flows in the gutters but the streets are still in flames.… And some idiot just got on the line and asked if the No Smoking signs were properly placed while the wooden buildings are on their way to becoming rubble! Idiots. They are all idiots!”

  “Get back here!” yelled Bourne, having made the jeep lurch through the gate. “He’s in here somewhere! You drive and I’ll—” Jason’s words were cut off by a deafening explosion up ahead in the center of “Madrid’s” Paseo del Prado. It was an enormous detonation, lumber and stone arcing up into the flaming sky. Then, as if the Paseo itself were a living, throbbing immense wall of fire, the flames rolled forward, swinging to the left out of the “city” into the road that was the approach to the border gate. “Look!” shouted Bourne, reaching down out of the jeep, his hand scraping the graveled surface beneath; he brought his fingers to his face, his nostrils. “Christ,” he roared. “The whole goddamned road’s soaked with gasoline!” A burst of fire imploded thirty yards in front of the jeep, sending stones and dirt smashing into the metal grille, and propelling the flames forward with increasing speed. “Plastics!” said Jason to himself, then yelled at Benjamin, who was running to the jeep, “Go back there! Get everyone out of here! The son of a bitch has the place ringed with plastics! Head for the river!”

  “I’m going with you!” shouted the young Soviet, grabbing the edge of the door.

  “Sorry, Junior,” cried Bourne, gunning the engine and swerving the army vehicle back into the open gate, sending Benjamin sprawling onto the gravel. “This is for grown-ups.”

  “What are you doing?” screamed Benjamin, his voice fading as the jeep sped across the border.

  “The fuel truck, that lousy fuel truck!” whispered Jason as he raced into “Strasbourg, France.”

  It happened in “Paris”—where else but Paris! The huge duplicate of the Eiffel Tower blew up with such force that the earth shook. Rockets? Missiles? The Jackal had stolen missiles from the Kubinka Armory! Seconds later, starting far behind him, the explosions began as the streets burst into flames. Everywhere. All “France” was being destroyed in a way that the madman Adolf Hitler could only have envisaged in his most twisted dreams. Panicked men and women ran through the alleyways and the streets, screaming, falling, praying to gods their leaders had forsworn.

  “England!” He had to get into “England” and then ultimately into “America,” where all his instincts told him the end would come—one way or another. He had to find the truck that was being driven by the Jackal and destroy both. He could do it—he could do it! Carlos thought he was dead and that was the key, for the Jackal would do what he had to do, what he, Jason Bourne, would do if he were Carlos. When the holocaust he had ignited was at its zenith, the Jackal would abandon the truck and put into play his means of escape—his escape to Paris, the real Paris, where his army of old men would spread the word of their monseigneur’s triumph over the ubiquitous, disbelieving Soviets. It would be somewhere near the tunnel; that was a given.

  The race through “London,” “Coventry” and “Portsmouth” could only be likened to the newsreel footage from World War II depicting the carnage hurled down on Great Britain by the Luftwaffe, compounded by first the screaming and then the silent terror of the V-2 and V-5 rockets. But the residents of Novgorod were not British—forbearance gave way to mass hysteria, concern for all became survival for self alone. As the impressive reproductions of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament crashed down in flames and the aircraft factories of “Coventry” were reduced to raging fires, the streets swelled with screaming, horrified crowds racing through the roads that led to the Volkhov River and the shipyards of “Portsmouth.” There, from the scaled-down piers and slips, scores threw themselves into rushing waters only to be caught in the magnesium grids where sharp, jagged bolts of electricity blazingly zigzagged through the air, leaving limp bodies floating toward the next metal traps above and below the angry surface. In paralyzed fragments, the crowds watched and turned in panic, fighting their way back into the miniaturized city of “Portsea”; the guards had abandoned their posts and chaos ruled the night.

  Snapping on the jeep’s searchlight, Bourne drove in sudden spurts down

alleyways and the less crowded narrow streets—south, always south. He grabbed a flare from the army vehicle’s floor, pulled the release string, and proceeded to thrust the spitting, hissing, blinding burst of fire into the hands and faces of the hysterical racing stragglers who tried to climb on board. The sight of the constantly pulsating flame so close to their eyes was enough; each screamed and recoiled in terror, no doubt thinking yet another explosive had detonated in his or her immediate vicinity.

  A graveled road! The gates to the American compound were less than a hundred yards away.… The graveled road? Soaked with fuel! The plastic charges had not gone off—but they would in a matter of moments, creating a wall of fire, enveloping the jeep and its driver! With the accelerator pressed to the floor, Jason raced to the gate. It was deserted—and the iron barrier was down! He slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop, hoping beyond reasonable hope that no sparks would fly out and ignite the gravel. Placing the spewing flare on the metal floor, he swiftly removed two grenades from his pockets—grenades he was loath to part with—pulled the pins, and hurled both toward the gate. The massive explosions blew the barricade away and instantly set the graveled road on fire, the leaping flames immediate—enveloping him! He had no choice; he threw the hot flare away and sped through the tunnel of fire into Novgorod’s final largest compound. As he did so the concrete guardhouse at the “English” border exploded; glass, stone and shards of metal shot out and up everywhere.

  He had been so filled with anxiety on their way to the crossing into “Spain” that he barely recalled the diminutive replicas of the “American” cities and towns, much less the fastest routes that led to the tunnel. He had merely followed young Benjamin’s harsh shouted commands, but he did remember that the California-bred trainer kept referring to the “coast road—like Route One, man, up to Carmel!” It was, of course, those streets closest to the Volkhov, which in turn became, in no order of geographical sequence, a shoreline in “Maine,” the Potomac River of “Washington,” and the northern waters of Long Island Sound that housed the naval base at “New London.”

  The madness had reached “America.” Police cars, their sirens wailing, sped through the streets, men shouting into radios as people in various stages of dress and undress ran out of buildings and stores, screaming about the terrible earthquake that had hit this leg of the Volkhov, one even more severe than the catastrophe in Armenia. Even with the surest knowledge of devastating infiltration, the leaders of Novgorod could not reveal the truth. It was as if the seismic geologists of the world were forgotten, their discoveries unfounded. The giant forces beneath the earth did not collide and erupt in terrible swift immediacy; instead, they worked in relays, sending a series of crippling body blows from north to south. Who questions authority in the panic of survival? Everyone in “America” was being prepared, primed for what they knew not.

  They found out roughly ten minutes after the destruction of a large part of the diminutive “Great Britain.” Bourne reached the compressed, miniaturized outlines of “Washington, D.C.” when the conflagration began. The first to plunge into flames, the sound of its detonation delayed only by milliseconds, was the wooden duplicate of the Capitol dome; it blew into the yellowed sky like the thin, hollow replica it was. Moments later—only moments—the Washington Monument, centered in its patch of grassy park, crumpled with a distant boom as if its false base had been shoveled away by a thunderous ground-moving machine. In seconds the artificial set piece that was the White House collapsed in flames, the explosions dulled both audibly and visibly, for “Pennsylvania Avenue” was awash in fire.

  Bourne knew where he was now. The tunnel was between “Washington” and “New London, Connecticut”! It was no more than five minutes away! He drove the jeep down to the street paralleling the river, and again there were frightened, hysterical crowds. The police were shouting through loudspeakers, first in English and then in Russian, explaining the terrible consequences if anyone tried to swim across the water, the searchlights swinging back and forth, picking up the floating bodies of those who had tried in the northern compounds.

  “The tunnel, the tunnel! Open the tunnel!”

  The screams from the excited crowds became a chant that could not physically be denied; the underground pipeline was about to be assaulted. Jason leaped out of the surrounded jeep, pocketing the remaining three flares, and propelled his way, arms and shoulders working furiously, often fruitlessly, through the crushing, crashing bodies. There was nothing else for it; he pulled out a flare and ripped the release from its recess. The spewing flame had its effect; heat and fire were catalysts. He ran through the crowd, pummeling everyone in front of him, shoving the blinding, spitting flare into terrified faces, until he reached the front and faced a cordon of guards in the uniforms of the United States Army. It was crazy, insane! The world had gone nuts!

  No! There! In the fenced-off parking lot was the fuel truck! He broke through the cordon of guards, holding up his computerized release card, and ran up to the soldier with the highest-ranking insignia on his uniform, a colonel with an AK-47 strapped to his waist who was as panicked as any officer of high rank he had ever seen since Saigon.

  “My identification is with the name ‘Archie’ and you can clear it immediately. Even now I refuse to speak our language, only English! Is that understood? Discipline is discipline!”

  “Togda?” yelled the officer, questioning the moment, then instantly returning to English in a maddeningly Boston accent. “Of course, we know of you,” he cried, “but what can I do? This is an uncontrollable riot!”

  “Has anyone passed through the tunnel in the last, say, half hour?”

  “No one, absolutely, no one! Our orders are to keep the tunnel closed at all costs!”

  “Good.… Get on the loudspeakers and disperse the crowds. Tell them the crisis has passed and the danger with it.”

  “How can I? The fires are everywhere, the explosions everywhere!”

  “They’ll stop soon.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know! Do as I say!”

  “Do as he says!” roared a voice behind Bourne; it was Benjamin, his face and shirt drenched with sweat. “And I hope to hell you know what you’re talking about!”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Where you know; how is another question. Try scaring the shit out of Capital HQ for a chopper ordered by an apoplectic Krupkin from a hospital bed in Moscow.”

  “ ‘Apoplectic’—not bad for a Russian—”

  “Who gives me such orders?” yelled the officer of the guard. “You are only a young man!”

  “Check me out, buddy, but do it quick,” answered Benjamin, holding out his card. “Otherwise I think I’ll have you transferred to Tashkent. Nice scenery, but no private toilets.… Move, you asshole!”

  “Cal—if—fornia, here I—”

  “Shut up!”

  “He’s here! There’s the fuel truck. Over there.” Jason pointed to the huge vehicle that dwarfed the scattered cars and vans in the fenced parking area.

  “A fuel truck? How did you figure it out?” asked the astonished Benjamin.

  “That tank’s got to hold close to a hundred thousand pounds. Combined with the plastics, strategically placed, it’s enough for the streets and those fake structures of old, dried wood.”

  “Slushaytye!” blared the myriad loudspeakers around the tunnel, demanding attention, as indeed the explosions began to diminish. The colonel climbed on top of the low, concrete gatehouse, a microphone in his hand, his figure outlined in the harsh beams of powerful searchlights. “The earthquake has passed,” he cried in Russian, “and although the damage is extensive and the fires will continue throughout the night, the crisis has passed!… Stay by the banks of the river, and our comrades in the maintenance crews will do their best to provide for your needs.… These are orders from our superiors, comrades. Do not give us reason to use force, I plead with you!”

  “What earthquake?” shouted a

man in the front ranks of the panicked multitude. “You say it’s an earthquake and we are all told it is an earthquake but your brains are in your bowels! I’ve lived through an earthquake and this is no earthquake. It is an armed attack!”

  “Yes, yes! An attack!”

  “We are being attacked!”

  “Invaded! It’s an invasion!”

  “Open the tunnel and let us out or you’ll have to shoot us down! Open the tunnel!”

  The protesting chorus grew from all sections of the desperate crowd as the soldiers held firm, their bayonets unsheathed and affixed to their rifles. The colonel continued, his features contorted, his voice nearly matching the hysteria of his frenzied audience.

  “Listen to me and ask yourselves a question!” he screamed. “I’m telling you, as I have been told, that this is an earthquake and I know it’s true. Further, I will tell you how I know it’s true!… Have you heard a single gunshot? Yes, that is the question! A single gunshot! No, you have not!… Here, as in all the compounds and in every sector of those compounds, there are police and soldiers and trainers who carry weapons. Their orders are to repel by force any unwarranted displays of violence, to say nothing of armed invaders! Yet nowhere has there been any gunfire—”

  “What’s he shouting about?” asked Jason, turning to Benjamin.

  “He’s trying to convince them it is—or was—an earthquake. They don’t believe him; they think it’s an invasion. He’s telling them it couldn’t be because there’s been no gunfire.”

  “Gunfire?”

  “That’s his proof. Nobody’s shooting at anybody and they sure as hell would be if there was an armed attack. No gunshots, no attack.”

  “Gunshots … ?” Bourne suddenly grabbed the young Soviet and spun him around. “Tell him to stop! For God’s sake, stop him!”