The End is Coming

Chapter Twenty

It was like solving a puzzle, Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy told himself.

“Damn this,” he murmured, blinking his eyes as he looked up from the litter of papers. “A man could go blind—” he began, not finishing it.

He stood up, lighting a cigarette.

Tired.

A puzzle. Intelligence reports from before The Night of The War, comparing these with areas that had survived the bombing, the missile strikes.

The Eden Project. If the astronaut had not been killed—died of his heart attack so shortly after the duel between the American Rourke and his prede-cessor, Vladmir Karamatsov. The astronaut might have known.

Rozhdestvenskiy inhaled on his cigarette, the intake of breath making a light whistling sound. He returned to his desk under the fluorescent tube fixture, studying the sheaves of reports, data—

The Eden Project had launched from the Ken-nedy Space Center in Florida—just before the hits on the center had destroyed it. What had remained had been searched, but further searching was im-possible after the complete destruction of peninsu-lar Florida in the massive quakes in the wake of the slippage of the artificial faultline created by the bombing.

He made himself assume that the answer was not beneath the ocean. California—but the bombing on The Night of The War had triggered the San Andreas faultline—and there was no California.

The triangle—

He walked to the wall to his left, beside his desk.

He found Bevington, Kentucky’s approximate location—the site of the factory that had been uti-lized in the manufacture of materials critical to The Eden Project. But the factory had been de-stroyed before he could find what he had sought.

“Triangle,” he said in English.

In his mind he formed one leg of a triangle be-tween Bevington, Kentucky and the crosshatched area where peninsular Florida had once been, to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. He looked to the west across the map.

There was only one other place—and somehow Karamatsov must have known of it, the reason why a KGB base had been established at the over-run Air Force Base in Texas. He drew the other leg of the triangle, Be-vington, Kentucky and the factory there repre-senting the triangle’s apex.

His eye drew the baseline—between the Ken-nedy Space Center and Houston, Texas.

“The Johnson Space Center,” he whispered.

After the Texas volunteer militia and U.S. II forces had retaken the base, Karamatsov and Ma-jor Tiemerovna barely escaping with their lives, Soviet freedom of action in Texas had been se-verely reduced.

“The Johnson Space Center—”

He turned to the telephone on his desk—waiting an instant. If he were wrong, there was really no other place to look and he would be dead. They would all be dead.

He lifted the receiver. “This is Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy—the Elite Corps strike force duty officer—I wish to speak with him immedi-ately—”

The cigarette had burned down between his fin-gers and yellowed his flesh.