by Ahern, Jerry
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Title : #19 : FINAL RAIN
Series : Survivalist
Author(s) : Jerry Ahern
Location : Gillian Archives
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CHAPTER ONE
The rain fell in droplets so huge that they were individually visible to the naked eye, even in all-but-total darkness. The rain was cold, icing over the places where the wiper blades didn’t reach, driven in sheets on high intensity winds, its ferocity such against the helicopter gunship’s cockpit bubble that, as Rourke guided the crippled aircraft out of the night sky and onto the wave-lashed beach of the volcanic atoll, he several times thought they might not make it.
“Mayday.Mayday. Aircraft calling the Arkhangelsk. Come in. Over.” It was the same message Paul Rubenstein had been sending since the main rotor pitch control began malfunctioning. And it was the only message they could send. To give position, or for that matter, to send a longer message, would be inviting triangulation and discovery by the Soviet naval forces or high altitude Soviet observation craft under the command of Antonovitch. Either enemy force’s attention at the moment was something John Rourke didn’t need, the helicopter useless in its present condition.
“Leave it, Paul. If they haven’t picked us up by now, they’re not going to. Probably figured we’d land with this weather, even considering how little they know about aircraft. Only common sense. Darkwood’s sub wouldn’t be near enough to the surface to pick up a transmission at
our sending strength, hot with winds like these to navigate against. Submarines are terribly unstable in rough weather when they’re on the surface and Darkwood’d have to dive. He’s no fool. Even a monster-sized sub like that Soviet Island Classen He’s probably riding it out down deep, waiting for the storm to subside to re-establish contact with us. He knows our approximate position and we know his course.”
Paul Rubenstein hung up his headset, murmuring under his breath. The cockpit dome light, combined with the lighted instrument panel and the coal-black darkness of the storm surrounding them, diffused a blue-white wash to everything, even their hands.
John Thomas Rourke moved back along the fuselage, hitting on a bank of overhead lights there as he went, hearing Paul behind him. “I’ll go with you.”
“I wish you could go instead of me,” Rourke smiled back at the younger man. “But no — you stay inside and try the pitch control when I tell you to. I don’t want to go out into this more than once.” Rourke sluffed out of his battered brown bomber jacket, catching up the black German parka from a rack on the port side of the fuselage. German arctic gear was supposed to be exceedingly waterproof. He had the feeling he was about to give it the ultimate test. Rourke pulled the parka on over the double Alessi rig he habitually wore with the twin stainless Detonics .45s. He closed the coat, zipping it full to his throat, the collar up. The black BDU pants he wore—Mid-Wake issue—supposedly had water-resistant properties as well. He’d test them too. Rourke pulled up the parka hood, snorkeling it over his face until there was a mere circular opening. Gloves. The tool kit. He was ready.
“Keep listening for the radio, just in case Darkwood’s out of this weather. We have no idea where this front came from and how extensive it is.” Rourke caught up his M-16. They were deep inside enemy territory, evidence mounting since joining forces with Jason Darkwood, captain of the United States nuclear submarine Ronald Wilson Reagan, that there were several small Soviet land bases established in these islands, bases of Mid-Wake’s historic enemy beneath the waves.
The land war, which had been fought for five centuries by forces unaware of a similar conflict beneath the sea, and by the submarine forces of Mid-Wake and their Soviet enemies, unaware that life still existed on the land, was broadening inexorably into global warfare, the likes of which had never been experienced in the history of mankind’s fragile tenure on Earth.
Despite the risk of touching down near a Soviet Marine Spetsnaz outpost, there was nothing else to do but to land—while landing was still possible—and fix the pitch control, the downpour of rain and sleet be damned. If a random lightning strike had contributed to the malfunction—electrical activity was frighteningly intense during the lull while the snow had stopped, while the warm front moved in on almost too heavy winds—the helicopter might be unrepairable. If the rotor were partially iced up, Rourke could jury-rig out of the main wiring harness to create a convection heater and keep the unit from re-icing, thawing it in the process.
The snow which had fallen so unceasingly was, at least, easier to cope with. As he grabbed up the mooring lines, his enthusiasm for the task ahead was totally lacking. But time was critical. John Rourke shot a wave to Paul Rubenstein and threw open the fuselage door, and was nearly thrown down to the deck by the ferocity of the wind, and rain, and sleet, but he dragged his way through, jumping to the ground, his boots sinking into ice-encrusted snow. As soon as Rourke’s hands were clear of the door frame, Paul hauled the door to. The wind combined with the rain had the effect of standing beneath a waterfall, the temperature of the water hovering near freezing. And, despite the water-resistant arctic gear, Rourke’s muscles began to tense with the sudden shock to his system.
He started to push away from the fuselage, the wind all but hurtling him back, his body angled into it, his right arm up to give more protection to the opening in the snorkel hood. The sling of his rifle, the backs of his
gloves, all were coated with a thin layer of ice. The BDU pants weren’t adequate insulation for his legs and the muscles across his thighs began stiffening. He kept going, reaching the nose of the craft. He turned into the wind, squinting against it, picked his spot, laying out the first mooring line, securing it to the aircraft, the line stiff with ice, crackling under his hands.
Then he led it out into the wind, each step more difficult than the last. Fifty feet from the chopper, he stopped, standing on the line lest it be whipped away in the wind, then kneeling on it as he fumbled open the already ice-cased tool kit. Like a combination of pitons and railroad spikes, the mooring posts were a good eight inches in length, light in weight like aluminum. He took one from the case, closing the case after he removed the hammer. He set the case down, using the hammer to whack the spike into the iced-over rock of the atoll’s beach perimeter. He was worried the mooring spike might not be strong enough to penetrate the mixture of volcanic rock and coral re-» mains, yet it did, but only after considerable effort.
As he made to pick up the tool case, Rourke realized it was frozen to the rock. He struggled with it for several seconds before it would dislodge… .
Paul Rubenstein watched John Rourke through the port in the sliding door. He should have gone into the storm with John, but John was right. Someone had to be inside. But he could have gone with him, then re-entered the aircraft. “Nuts.” Paul Rubenstein slipped off his field jacket and grabbed down his parka. …
The second spike was nearly in and John Rourke almost reached for the already ice-encrusted M-16, much good that it would have done, the motion beside him startling him. But it was Paul. “Here! Let me do that!” Paul Rubenstein shouted over the wind. John Rourke surrendered the hammer, trying to rub the stiffness from his thighs.
The last spike was in, the German helicopter as secure as they could make it against the now near-gale-force winds. John Rourke gestured toward the chopper. His friend gestured to himself, then toward the main rotor. Rourke shook his head. After a moment’s pause, Paul Rubenstein nodded, clambering over one of the iced-over guy cables, starting toward the gunship.
Rourke stood there a moment, debating whether to pull down his hood and goggle up or tough it out witho
ut the goggles as he had been doing. His eyebrows already felt frozen and what little skin of his face was exposed felt numb. The thought of being soaked beneath the protection of the hood in the wind-propelled icewater was too much. He gave up on the goggles. Squinting against the driven freezing rain again, John Rourke started for the gunship’s ladder rungs.
They were ice encrusted, but starting to melt, the defroster for the ladder rungs activated the moment of touchdown. Slowly, John Rourke started up toward the main rotor.
His body ached with the cold and his face tingled with it. The rain and ice pelted the skin of the gunship as he moved forward, seating himself at one of the two control consoles. There was something coming over the radio as he scanned the ultra high frequency bands. It sounded like a moan, someone or something in its death agony, crying out. Paul rubbed his hands together, stared into the night. He couldn’t see John any more. The transmission he’d thought he’d heard—he told himself it was imagination— was probably just an electronic ghost. The first time he’d heard one, the experience had unnerved him. But, with the anomalies of the atmosphere and the electrical storm in the higher altitude level they’d just abandoned, it was to be expected. He couldn’t see John, but could hear him overhead now; and there was more than a little reassurance in that.
There was nothing to do, the radio set on scan to pick up whatever transmission might come their way, friend or foe—or ghost again—and John not yet having signaled to try the pitch control. Paul Rubenstein stood up, walking aft to where he had stowed the few belongings he’d brought for the expedition. The coat he’d worn outside was still partially coated with ice, a growing puddle be
neath where it hung, thawing. His gloves, set on the bench along the starboard bulkhead, were gnarled and twisted and stiff.
Rain and ice hammered against the exterior of the -helicopter and, when the gusts” were right, the wind nearly toppled it, or so it felt, the helicopter physically shuddering. John was on top of the aircraft. Paul shuddered. Should they have moored it more securely against the winds? But how could they have?
He closed his eyes for a moment.
The important thing was that Annie and Natalia and Otto Hammerschmidt were alive. He opened his eyes. From out of his pack, he took a watertight bag. Inside it was a similar bag. He opened this as well. Inside this second layer of waterproof material was his journal.
He returned to the cockpit and leafed through its pages before he began to write. He’d started his journal or diary while a passenger aboard the ill-fated aircraft where he’d first met John the very Night of the War. He read his initial impressions of John Rourke. “A tall man, high forehead but thick head of hair, this man claims he is a doctor of medicine. But why does a doctor of medicine know how to fly a jet aircraft? That’s what he’s got to be doing. Are the pilots dead because of the bomb blasts near the plane? Are we all dying? This man, the doctor. There is something in his face, deep in his eyes. I saw it there as he looked along the aisle. Am I grasping at straws? Because the man’s face somehow reassured me.”
Through his desert travels with John Rourke to Albuquerque, the church there with the burn victims, the priest, the little girl whom John couldn’t save. The look of anger mixed with sadness in John’s eyes.
The return journey to the downed commercial jet.A ride of a lifetime in a ‘57 Chevy with the Beach Boys singing on the tape deck. But then the massacre at the plane, the Brigands, John Rourke—he was like some man out of a spaghetti western, the few words, the fast guns, even the squint in his eyes. Sandy Benson, the blond-haired stewardess had told John she’d known he’d come back. She died in John’s arms. Together, he and John had gotten the bodies of the dead passengers and crew together and torched the aircraft. On motorcycles belonging to the dead Brigands, he and John set out.
Paul Rubenstein closed his eyes, felt himself smiling. He hadn’t known then that there was something very special about that moment, that it established the pattern for the rest of his life. John Rourke. Paul Rubenstein. Together.
They found the Brigand encampment.
John rode in alone on the back of a Harley belonging to one of the Brigands.
At the top of the page of his journal, the words “trigger control, trigger control” were written. He wasn’t flattering himself that he’d become a real hand with that submachinegun, carrying the Schmiesser to this very day. He’d learned to ride a motorcycle as well as almost any man and better than most. Falling off had taught him a lot.
Together.Across the country. Even across time.
From the Night of the War through the Great Conflagration, when the skies caught fire from the ionization effects of the nuclear materials which suffused the atmosphere.And The Sleep.
In five centuries, mankind—or what remained—had come full circle, on the brink of global warfare. But this time, one single nuclear detonation might destroy the fragile envelope of atmosphere which had partially restored itself in those five centuries while John and John’s wife, Sarah, and Michael and Annie—Annie a grown woman, his wife—and Natalia cryogenically slept.
He flipped through many pages.
The Eden Project. That time, he’d almost died. The Soviet gunships under the command of Vladmir Karamatsov’s KGB Elite Corps attacked as the Eden Project space shuttles were making their precarious landings. After five centuries on an elliptical orbit to the edge of the solar system and back, the astronauts aboard surviving by means of the same cryogenic sleep which had preserved the Rourke family at the Retreat in the mountains of Northeastern Georgia, all Karamatsov had wanted was to de
stray them, shoot the weaponless shuttlecraft out of the sky as they landed.
Paul Rubenstein stared at the helicopter gunship’s controls. He could fly such a ship now, not well, but fly it a little. John said he was learning quickly. But then—Paul Rubenstein shivered. It wasn’t .the cold, but the memory. He took that craft up, shot it out with the Soviet gunships. Did his bit, was wounded, his gunship crippled and he wouldn’t have known how to land it even if it hadn’t been.
But John saved his life.
The relationship with John Rourke was a little uneven from the start, but less uneven—a little, at least—as time went by. But no one—not even John’s grown son, Michael—was another John Rourke. There could never be another John Rourke.
Paul Rubenstein turned to the last entry. “Annie’s alive! Yeah! Today, with the help of a group of Mid-Wake U.S. Marine Corps and Navy personnel, we captured the Soviet Island Class submarine Arkhangelsk. Jason Darkwood— he reminds me of John, the way he has of always being right—commands her. The atrocity committed by the Soviet personnel from that damned domed city beneath the Pacific is something impossible to forget. Burning men to death. The message was clear. War. We gave them a message back. If these enemy forces were to combine with the land and air forces under the command of Antonovitch, would we be able to stop them? Would the forces of New Germany, the gentle people of Hekla in Lydveldid Island, the meager numbers of the Eden Project survivors and the Chinese of the First City, combined, have any chance to prevail? And, if Annie and I were somehow to live, where would we go in the face of the defeat of our allies? Find the mythical Third Chinese City, wherever that is? Hide in the Retreat for five more centuries? Then what? The war goes on. Will it ever end? John, although more vigorous than ever, grows weary of it, I know. I think that Natalia’s nervous breakdown (if that’s the right term) is the only thing that has truly frightened John Rourke. It’s there and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t find it, fight it, change it. Her condition is there and remedying it is out of his hands. God bless them both.”
Paul Rubenstein took up his pen. “Enroute to Mid-Wake, shepherding the boarded submarine Arkhangelsk under the command of Captain Jason Darkwood, USN, we encountered a totally unexpected weather front. The snow, which at times throughout its course I’d thought would never end at all, ended abruptly. High winds, lightning that in all honesty scared me to
death, seemed to appear out of nowhere, on its heels a rainstorm unlike anything I’d ever seen. It surrounds us as this is written, but we are not airborne now. Hopefully, it was only ice which fouled the pitch control for the main rotor. John is outside finding out. I would have insisted more that I work to free the rotor, but he knows what to do. Should the problem be electronic, we will be stuck here. I wonder if we’d ever be able to lift off in these winds, at any event. We might simply stay, wait it out. But, as soon as the storm subsides enough that we can attempt a takeoff, we must. Our helicopter would be a sitting duck for the deck guns of one of the Soviet Island Class submarines.
“John and I have discussed what to do with the machine once we reach Mid-Wake,” he continued writing. ‘The only option seems to be hiding it on some nearby island, if possible, otherwise scuttling it, then traveling below the waves with Darkwood’s crew or, perhaps by then, aboard Darkwood’s own ship, the U.S.S. Ronald Wilson Reagan. Darkwood’s second-in-command, Sebastian, is at its helm.”
He slammed closed the journal, staring into the night. He was amazed at himself, trying to use the naval jargon. He thought he was sounding like a poor imitation of Stevenson or Jack London.
And the scanner had locked onto something.
The unearthly howling sound again.
When the knock came on the overhead, Paul Rubenstein nearly drew the battered Browning High Power from the fabric chest holster in which he wore it.
But it had to be John, the knocking sound. Perhaps just
finishing up the wiring needed for the convection heater. If that was the case, it was a good sign that the problem was not from a lightning tip.
Try the pitch control? Not until John was safely in view, but he began studying the instruments.
What if the pitch control didn’t work?
CHAPTER TWO
The microphone was in a wire cradle over the illuminated chart table. “This is the captain speaking. Battle stations. I say again, Battle stations. This is not a drill. I’ll keep you advised.” He tossed the microphone to Aldridge, stepped up the few steps to the command chair and sank into it, his legs stretched out.