The Two Lost Mountains Page 6

  Jack had entirely forgotten about Alby, waiting back at the secret presidential train station.

  But then, he supposed, if he had remembered, he’d have assumed Alby had succumbed to the bell when it had taken out Aloysius.

  But he hadn’t.

  Because there was something special about Alby.

  Alby was deaf.

  He was only able to hear because of the brilliant device implanted in his skull: a Cochlear implant that turned natural sounds into digital ones.

  The bell hadn’t affected him.

  Jack leapt into action.

  He handed Aloysius to Alby while he kept Lily on his shoulder and dragged Stretch himself. Alby hoisted Aloysius up into a fireman’s carry.

  Relieved of the extra weight, Jack moved much faster now and he and Alby fled into the beautiful nave of St Basil’s.

  They ignored the splendid high-ceilinged nave, instead just scampering down some side stairs, heading one level down, until they spotted the secret tunnel to the Kremlin—

  —when suddenly ten bronzemen emerged from that tunnel, blocking that escape route.

  ‘Damn it, no!’ Jack breathed. ‘We can’t get out that way!’

  ‘What do we do?’ Alby said.

  Jack spun, thinking fast.

  Then he had a thought and he keyed the radio-mike on his headset, Aloysius’s headset.

  ‘Rufus? You there?’ he asked.

  ‘Cap’n West?’ came the confused reply. It was the voice of Aloysius’s gentle-giant pilot, Rufus. He was still at Vnukovo Airport on the southwestern outskirts of the city.

  Jack breathed with relief. As he’d hoped, Rufus wore the same ear-protecting headphones that Aloysius did.

  ‘Rufus! We’re in trouble! Aloysius is out cold! We’re stuck inside St Basil’s Cathedral and we need an immediate evac! Can you come and get us?’

  ‘You bet. Where do you want me to pick you up?’

  Jack looked upward and swallowed.

  ‘From on top of the cathedral.’

  Jack and Alby hauled ass up the tight stairwells of St Basil’s Cathedral, carrying their friends.

  While the nine onion-shaped domes atop the spires of St Basil’s Cathedral seem irregularly placed, they are actually arrayed in a symmetrical pattern: the four bigger domes form a + while the smaller domes form an × around them.

  The ninth dome occupies the highest and most central point of the cathedral, the top of the colossal spire above the nave. It is the only onion dome that is unpainted since it is made of gold.

  The cathedral ascends gradually in essentially three levels: its wide base, made of red bricks; a middle level comprising small sections of green-painted roofs that connect the trunks of the spires; and finally, the spectacular spires themselves.

  Jack kicked open a window and emerged on the western side of the middle roof level, standing between two of the spires and above the awning of the west portico.

  The slanting green awning of the portico sloped away from him in a step-like manner, heading both north and south.

  From this vantage point, he could see two of the car-carriers down on the square: they had almost finished disgorging their loads of bronzemen.

  At the northern end of the portico’s roof, he saw a crashed garbage truck. When its driver had been incapacitated by the first ringing of the spherical bell, he must have smashed up against the portico.

  Right now, the bronzemen from the car-carrier nearest to the garbage truck hurried past it, entering the cathedral.

  They moved fast, racing into the building via the portico’s ground-level doors.

  Alby stepped up beside Jack. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Rufus isn’t going to get here in time,’ Jack said.

  He jerked his chin at the crashed garbage truck.

  ‘We get on that and drive outta here,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  Down onto the roof of the portico they ran, carrying Lily, Aloysius and Stretch, while below them, the bronzemen invaded the cathedral via every available door.

  Jack and Alby came to the edge of the roof just above the garbage truck.

  ‘You go first,’ Jack said. ‘I’ll lower them down to you.’

  Alby lay Stretch down on the roof and leapt down to the garbage truck’s flat steel top.

  Jack passed Lily down to him first. Alby caught hold of her and slid her gently into the garbage truck’s cab.

  Jack lowered Stretch next. Working with his new artificial hand, Alby struggled a little as he guided Stretch’s body safely down into the garbage truck’s cabin—

  A sudden thudding noise made Jack spin.

  He looked behind him and his eyes boggled.

  He and Alby had been spotted by some bronzemen on the ground . . .

  . . . and so they’d started climbing the outer wall of the nearest spire!

  The bronzemen climbed with brutal efficiency.

  With their metal claws and shocking strength they just punched holes in the brickwork and scaled the vertical walls, climbing quickly.

  ‘Goddamn . . .’ Jack breathed.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ Alby agreed.

  Jack did the calculations in a split second.

  There wasn’t enough time for him to lower Aloysius and himself onto the garbage truck before the bronzemen swarmed it.

  He had to get Lily away.

  ‘Alby! Go! Get Lily outta here! We’ll catch up!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know yet! Just go!’

  Alby knew not to argue, so he just hopped down into the cab, shoved the comatose driver out the door, gunned the engine and zoomed away from the cathedral.

  On the roof of the portico, Jack hoisted Aloysius Knight onto his shoulders, grunting under the weight.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  There was only one way he could go and survive.

  Up.

  With the limp body of Aloysius Knight on his shoulders, Jack pounded up the tight spiral staircase inside the tallest spire of St Basil’s.

  He could hear the bronzemen ascending the stairs below him: a chorus of heavy footsteps.

  If anyone had been awake in Moscow to see St Basil’s from the outside at that moment, they would have seen quite a sight.

  It was literally crawling with bronzemen.

  They were scaling it on every side, dozens of them, punching handholds into its red brick walls and swarming like ants up its snow-covered flanks.

  They slithered around its onion domes, clambered up the vertical walls of its towers, converging on the central spire.

  At that instant, a small window up near the summit of the tallest spire was kicked open from within, sending a deposit of snow on the ledge outside it flying into thin air, and Jack emerged on the tiny ledge with Aloysius on his shoulders.

  Breathless and gasping, he looked down.

  A dizzying drop fell away from him. Greater Moscow spread out to the horizon.

  He also saw, directly below him, two dozen bronzemen coming for him, scaling the walls of the main tower like relentless metal demons: they were brilliant climbers, oblivious to the deadly height. They punched their hand- and footholds easily, and, worst of all, they never tired.

  ‘Damn,’ Jack said. He’d been climbing for two people and he was sweating and exhausted.

  He drew his Desert Eagle pistol and fired it at the nearest bronzeman.

  Ping!

  The bullet bounced off the metal face of the automaton with a spark. The bronzeman hardly noticed. It just kept climbing.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Jack said. ‘All right, then . . .’

  Jack fired again, this time at the brickwork near the bronzeman’s clawed hands, causing two brittle old bricks around the bronzeman’s fingers to shatter and give way . . .

  . . . and
this time the creature fell!

  It dropped away from Jack and Aloysius, collecting two of its fellow automatons on the way down.

  But the others just kept on coming.

  They climbed relentlessly, closing in around Jack.

  Jack fired at them anyway.

  His rounds pinged off their skulls harmlessly.

  The nearest bronzeman rose to its feet on the same parapet on which Jack now stood with Aloysius, only fifteen feet away.

  Jack levelled his pistol at it and fired—

  —and the bronzeman was blown off the parapet with violent force, as if hit by a cannonball, not a pistol round!

  ‘What the—?’ Jack looked incredulously at his gun.

  Vrooooom!

  With a deafening roar, Aloysius Knight’s black hover-capable Sukhoi Su-37 fighter-bomber—the Black Raven—came swooping into a hover behind Jack, right beside his high tower.

  It fired it cannons again, blowing the nearest bronzemen off the tower, sending them sailing off it and falling hundreds of feet.

  If the sight of the bronzemen swarming all over the famous cathedral was something to behold then the appearance of the Sukhoi beside its highest spire was simply spectacular.

  The Sukhoi edged in close to the spire, the thunderous downblast of its thrusters sending snow billowing everywhere in wild flurries.

  A steel cage on chains descended from the underbelly of the Sukhoi, swinging wildly, arriving next to Jack . . .

  . . . just as the first bronzeman—entirely oblivious to the swirling snowstorm around it—slammed one of its metal hands down on the ledge right next to Jack’s feet, its claws digging into the stone.

  Gripping Aloysius’s limp body on his shoulders, Jack leapt for the steel cage.

  Because he was holding Aloysius, he couldn’t reach with his hands. He had to dive into the open basket.

  Jack flew through the air, high above St Basil’s Cathedral and the hoard of climbing bronzemen—

  —and landed inside the basket, rolling to a halt within it, holding Aloysius tight.

  ‘Rufus! Go!’

  In response, the plane banked wildly, lunging away from the historic cathedral, engines roaring, thrusters flaring.

  Two bronzemen tried to leap into the basket after Jack and they almost made it, their outstretched claws missing it by millimetres.

  But the Sukhoi was away, clear of the building.

  ‘Where to?’ Rufus’s voice said in Jack’s headphones.

  Jack didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Catch up with Alby! He got away with Lily and Stretch in a garbage truck! Follow that truck!’

  As Jack was climbing up the inside of St Basil’s highest spire, Alby Calvin had been in the middle of his own private car chase.

  He was driving like a maniac across Red Square with two unconscious passengers in the cab with him and six bronzemen clinging to the sides of his speeding garbage truck.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, close behind him were two of the gigantic car-carriers that had brought the bronzemen into the square around St Basil’s.

  When the drivers of the car-carriers had seen Alby back out from the west portico in the garbage truck, they had powered up and come after him, their engines roaring and still with maybe ten bronzemen on each of their long multi-levelled trailers.

  As Alby had gunned his truck away from St Basil’s into the wider square, one of the two car-carriers had swept in close beside him and some bronzemen had leapt off it onto his moving garbage truck!

  Alby swerved wildly, but the bronzemen hung on.

  He swept right, grinding the right flank of his truck against the towering red wall of the Kremlin, and suddenly the three bronzemen clinging to that side were no longer there.

  ‘Take that, you metal assholes,’ Alby said.

  Right then, with a loud boom, Aloysius’s black Sukhoi Su-37 swept in low over him, rushing in from the southwest, heading for St Basil’s.

  Rufus had arrived.

  Alby hoped he could keep driving—and stay alive—long enough to meet up with the Sukhoi.

  He glanced in his left side mirror and saw two bronzemen on that flank of his truck, edging their way toward the cab.

  The garbage truck was now careening wildly down the steep brick-paved slope that connected Red Square to the Moskva River.

  The slope had a name: Basil’s Descent. The descent ran all the way down to the river beside the on-ramp to the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.

  Alby swung left and ground that flank of the garbage truck against the on-ramp’s foundations and the bronzemen were swept off—

  —only for one final enterprising bronzeman to attack suddenly from above him, from the roof of the garbage truck’s cabin.

  With the howling squeal of rending metal, this creature peeled back the roof of the truck, and the winter air rushed into the cab and Alby looked up in horror to see the faceless automaton glaring down at him, crouching, preparing to jump into the cab.

  In a panic, Alby slammed on the brakes.

  The inertia sent the bronzeman on the roof flying off the truck and tumbling, bouncing, cartwheeling down the descent before disappearing over the low fence guarding the river.

  The sudden braking movement, however, also locked the garbage truck’s wheels, sending it into a wild skid on the icy cobbled pavement of Basil’s Descent.

  Alby looked ahead, aghast, as his garbage truck aquaplaned down the hill, totally out of control, toward the river’s edge.

  There was no way to regain traction or to steer the heavy truck out of the skid. Indeed, the truck itself was rotating laterally as it shot toward the river, so that as it came to the guardrail, it was travelling ass-end first.

  Alby saw the future a second before it happened.

  The garbage truck, now sliding backwards, shot at speed off the bottom of the descent, blasting through the low fence, and dropped into the broad Moskva River below.

  Alby’s garbage truck fell, rear-end first, for a full twenty feet before it landed with an almighty crash not in water but on solid ground.

  Well, almost solid ground.

  It slammed into the frozen surface of the river.

  On most winter mornings in Moscow, icebreakers carved through the frozen-over river, opening paths in the ice for ferries.

  But with the city in a collective coma, the morning icebreakers had not done their usual job and now the wide Moskva River looked like a vast snow-covered field, frozen and white, with a crust of ice maybe twelve inches thick, more than enough to hold a car or even a large truck . . .

  . . . but not nearly thick enough to withstand the impact of a falling ten-ton garbage truck.

  Alby was thrown into his backrest as the garbage truck’s rear bumper smashed into the ice-covered surface of the river only a few metres from the Moskvoretsky Bridge.

  Like a hammer striking glass, the steel bumper of the truck cracked the ice instantly into a dozen spiderwebs.

  In any other circumstance, it would have looked comical: the garbage truck lying there nose-up and vertical, its wheels pressed against the embankment wall, its rear hopper embedded in the iced-over river.

  But not now, for with the ice broken, the garbage truck immediately and inexorably began to sink.

  Alby was moving in an instant.

  With the whole truck around him sliding downward, he threw off his seatbelt, kicked open the driver’s door and hurled Stretch out onto the ice.

  He grabbed Lily next and just as the sinking truck’s cab came level with the ice-crust and was about to go under, Alby leapt clear of it with Lily in his arms.

  They landed on the ice in a clumsy heap, with the unconscious Lily flopping like a ragdoll, just as the garbage truck disappeared completely into the hole it had created and was swallowed by the freezing waters of the Moskva. br />
  Alby gasped for air, his face pressed against the snow-dusted ice.

  ‘Man, this is hardcore—’

  They were the only words he got out before he saw a figure appear at the guardrail of the embankment high above him: another bronzeman.

  Alby didn’t know what to do.

  He still had Lily and Stretch to protect but he no longer had a vehicle to carry them in.

  He could hear the Sukhoi over at the cathedral: too far away.

  Six more bronzemen joined the one at the guardrail.

  ‘No,’ Alby said softly.

  His escape was over.

  It appeared suddenly from behind Alby, speeding out from under the nearby bridge, sliding to a controlled halt on the ice a few feet away from him, Lily and Stretch.

  It was a compact thing that looked like a motorcycle-snowmobile hybrid.

  The forward half was the motorbike part, with handlebars, a saddle and a ski instead of a front tyre. The rear half was like a little truck bed with two tracks underneath it. The logo of the Moscow Department of Parks was on its side.

  Two figures in bulky white parkas rode it—one astride the saddle, the other crouched in the rear tray—their faces obscured by reflective white goggles, white helmets with headphones and white scarves over their faces.

  The second pair of watchers.

  The rider tore the scarf and goggles off, to reveal herself to be a pretty young woman in her late twenties.

  ‘Quick!’ she yelled to Alby. ‘Get them on the tray! We gotta get outta here before—’

  With an almighty crash, one of the car-carriers came bouncing down the steps of a ferry platform further down the river. It rampaged down the stone steps, careless of the damage to its shock absorbers, before blasting out onto the ice-covered surface of the river.

  It was followed by a second transporter and a third, all of them speeding out onto the river, coming after Alby and the others.

  The second white-clad figure on the snowbike threw off her scarf to reveal herself to be significantly older than the rider. She was a woman of maybe seventy, with a wrinkled but kind face.

  ‘Move your ass, kid! We’re not here to hurt you!’ the older woman barked as she leapt nimbly down from the tray. ‘We’re nuns, we’re fans of the Oracle and we’re pissed as hell because these motherfuckers killed all our sisters at the convent! Now, haul ass!’