The fog on the bay was thick enough to chew.
Jason crouched in the bow of the small stealth boat, a converted rum-runner MacArthur had provided. The engine was muffled, a low throb barely audible over the slapping waves.
"Visibility is zero," O'Malley whispered, gripping the wheel. "If we hit a mine, we won't even know we're dead."
"Just get us to the dock," Jason said, his eyes scanning the gray nothingness. "The writers can't hold the island forever."
Alcatraz loomed out of the mist like a tombstone.
Flashes of light illuminated the cell block. Gunfire echoed across the water. The Soviets were shelling the island from their gunboats.
They pulled up to the hidden smuggling entrance.
Jason leaped onto the wet rocks. Sarah and Hemingway followed.
"Go! Go!"
They sprinted up the winding path to the prison yard.
The scene was chaos.
The Icarus sat in the center of the yard, looking like a wounded beast. Smoke poured from a hole in its flank where a mortar shell had hit.
Hughes was on a ladder, frantically welding a patch over the gas bag.
Oppenheimer stood at the base of the ramp, holding a heavy pistol with shaking hands. He looked like a librarian trying to defend a fortress.
"Jason!" Oppenheimer screamed, spotting them. "They're breaching the north wall! Spetsnaz!"
"Get inside!" Jason ordered. "Prepare the core!"
He turned to Hemingway.
"Ernest, hold the yard. Buy us five minutes."
Hemingway racked his shotgun. He grinned, a manic, dangerous smile.
"Five minutes?" Hemingway laughed. "I'll give you ten. I haven't finished my chapter yet."
He ran toward the breached wall, rallying the surviving writers. "Fix bayonets! Or pens! Whatever you have!"
Jason ran up the ramp of the Icarus.
The bridge was a mess of wires and sparks.
"Status!" Jason yelled.
"Reactor is stable but running hot!" Hughes shouted. "The Tesla Coil is burnt out from the LA jump! If we try to fire it again, it'll fuse!"
"We're not firing it for stealth," Jason said, moving to the engineering console. "We're going to overload it."
"What?"
"We need an EMP," Jason said. "A massive electromagnetic pulse. Strong enough to knock those airships out of the sky and stall every tank engine in the city."
"That will fry the Icarus too!" Hughes protested. "We'll be grounded! Trapped on this rock with the Russians and the flu!"
"Better stranded than Red," Jason snapped. "Do it! Bypass the safety regulators!"
Oppenheimer hesitated. "Jason, if we dump the entire capacitor bank into the coil at once... it might not just be an EMP. It could arc. It could kill us."
"Do it, Robert. That's an order."
BOOM.
The prison door blew open.
Three Soviet commandos in gray camo burst onto the hangar deck.
O'Malley opened fire with his Thompson. TAT-TAT-TAT.
Two of the commandos fell. The third rolled behind a crate and returned fire.
"We're boarded!" O'Malley yelled, pinned down.
"Keep working!" Jason shouted to the scientists. He grabbed a fire axe from the wall.
He moved through the smoke, flanking the crate.
The commando popped up. Jason swung the axe.
CRUNCH.
The blunt end hit the soldier in the helmet, knocking him cold.
Jason looked at the fallen man. He wasn't wearing a mask. His face was blue. Foam was bubbling from his mouth.
"He's sick," Jason realized. "Even the elite troops."
"Jason!" Sarah screamed from the bridge. "Look out the window!"
Jason ran to the viewport.
A massive shape was descending through the fog.
The lead Soviet airship. The Red October.
It hovered directly over the prison yard, its shadow swallowing the Icarus. Ropes dropped from its belly. Dozens of soldiers began to slide down.
And standing in the open gondola door, looking down through a pair of binoculars, was a man in a long leather coat and round glasses.
Leon Trotsky.
The leader of the Red Army. Here. Personally.
"He wants the ship intact," Jason realized. "He's not shelling us. He's boarding us."
"Coil is primed!" Oppenheimer yelled. "Capacitors at 120%!"
"Wait," Jason said. "Let them get close. Let them commit."
The first wave of Soviet troops hit the ground. Hemingway and his writers engaged them in hand-to-hand combat. It was brutal. Typewriters against bayonets.
"Now!" Jason screamed. "Fire!"
Oppenheimer slammed the switch.
WHUMMMMM.
The sound wasn't loud. It was deep. A vibration that rattled the bones.
A wave of violet energy exploded from the Icarus. It rippled out in a visible sphere of distortion.
The lights in the prison yard shattered.
The Soviet soldiers' radios sparked and died.
Above them, the Red October shuddered. Its engines cut out instantly. The massive propellers stopped spinning.
Gravity took over.
The giant airship groaned. It tilted forward. Without engine power to maintain stability, it began to drift helplessly toward the bay.
"It's working!" Hughes cheered. "They're dead in the water!"
Across the bay, the lights of San Francisco winked out. The tanks on the Presidio stopped moving. The gunboats went silent.
Then the Icarus went dark.
The emergency lights flickered and died. The hum of the reactor vanished.
Silence.
"We fried ourselves," Hughes whispered in the dark. "The electronics are slag. We're not going anywhere."
"We bought time," Jason said, leaning against the cold console. "MacArthur can mop them up now. Without their tech, they're just men."
Gunfire erupted from the shore. MacArthur's shore batteries—ancient, mechanical cannons that didn't need electricity—opened fire on the drifting Soviet fleet.
Jason walked down the ramp into the yard.
The fighting had stopped. The Soviet soldiers, confused and cut off, were surrendering to Hemingway's ragtag militia.
Trotsky's airship had crashed into the water a mile out, slowly sinking.
"We won," O'Malley said, reloading his empty gun. He looked exhausted.
Jason looked at the sky. It was clearing. The sun was rising.
But there was no joy in it.
Sarah came running from the infirmary tent they had set up in the cell block.
"Jason," she called out.
Something in her voice made his blood run cold.
He turned.
She wasn't running to hug him. She stopped ten feet away.
She was holding a handkerchief to her mouth.
She pulled it away.
It was spotted with blood. Dark, blue-tinged blood.
Jason froze.
"Sarah?"
She smiled weakly. Her lips were pale.
"I tried to be careful," she whispered. "But the infirmary... there were so many of them."
She coughed. A wet, hacking sound that rattled in her chest.
Jason stepped forward.
"Stay back," she warned, holding up a hand. "It's highly contagious."
Jason didn't stop. He walked right up to her.
"I don't care," Jason said.
He grabbed her hand. Her skin was burning hot. Fever.
"We have the gold," Jason said, his voice shaking. "We have the smartest men in the world. We can fix this."
Sarah looked at him with sad, tired eyes.
"You can fix an economy, Jason," she said softly. "You can fix a government. But you can't bribe a virus."
Jason pulled her into his arms. He held her tight, as if he could squeeze the sickness out of her.
Around them, the victorious writers cheered. The sun shone on the Golden Gate.
But Jason didn't see any of it.
He only felt the heat of her skin, and the terrifying fragility of the life he had fought so hard to save.
"Oppenheimer," Jason barked over his shoulder, his voice breaking. "Get the microscope. We're not done fighting."