by Ahern, Jerry
Return fire.
Paul Rubenstein fired. One man, then another. A sixth man went down, spinning into the slush with a violent splash, the seventh man’s rifle firing wildly. Paul fired as John Rourke fired, the man’s body lifted off its feet and was thrown into the rocks behind him.
Paul Rubenstein walked forward, a dozen rounds or so remaining in the submachinegun, shifting it to his left hand, drawing the Browning High Power, thumbing back the hammer.
“John?”
“I’m all right. You?”
“Yeah, I think.” They had just killed seven men. Presumably, John killed the eighth man without the others noticing, likely with the big knife Jack Crain had made for John five centuries before. It was the size of a short sword.
Paul Rubenstein stopped walking, less than a dozen yards from John Rourke. “This was too easy,” John observed. “These men were half dead from exposure. They weren’t looking for us. They were getting away from something here on the island or running to something. Maybe. We have to find out. Let’s go inside and warm up for a while. We can’t take off in this.”
“Right,” Paul nodded. What would eight Soviet Marine Spetsnaz be running away from on an island the size of a dozen or so football fields? Or running to?
There was no talk of burying the dead men. The ice and snow would have them buried soon enough, but John began digging through their pockets and Paul Rubenstein crouched down into the freezing slush to help him.
What?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Huddled together with blankets wrapped around them, they sat just aft of the cockpit, steaming mugs of coffee made with the microwave immersion heater on the console before them, by the overhead lights studying the few personal effects they had taken from the bodies of the eight Marine Spetsnaz personnel.
“What’s this say, John?”
John Rourke took the notebook. “It’s a diary.”
“I hate this.”
“I know; so do I,” John Rourke observed. He opened the diary and began reading as he found the most recent entry. “Mainly personal things. He missed his girl.”
The younger man stood up, nearly banging his head into an instrument rack.
“Wait,” John Rourke almost whispered. “He says here that he was frightened because of the secrecy surrounding the installation. He wasn’t even being told where they were going. He was worried that if something went wrong, the destruct mechanism was so powerful they’d all be killed. And if something went wrong, who would retrieve them?” Rourke looked at Rubenstein. “That’s all he says about it.”
“Some sort of installation. For what? And here?”
“If they came from the north, well,” John Rourke smiled.
“Going into that again isn’t my favorite thing in the world.”
“No-you stay here with the machine.”
“Wait a second,” Paul began. “I can-“
“If there’s an installation of some sort here, then there’s a substantial likelihood more of them will be out there, and could find us. One of us has to stay. I’ve got more background in arctic survival than you, plus I’m a physician.”
”But you can fly the helicopter,” Paul insisted.
“Not in this. No-you stay here, keeping an eye out on that intruder system. I’ll dress as warmly as possible. You wrap up an M-16 for me to keep it dry. I’ll get started.” And John Rourke took a swallow of his coffee.
It was hot.
It felt good.
CHAPTER NINE
He had walked at a steady pace, neither so fast as to build up perspiration nor so slowly as to allow the cold to get at his muscles, this complicated by the uncertain footing, ice ridges everywhere and snow falling in what amounted to sheets, driven on a wind Rourke gauged at gusting to well over forty miles per hour.
But this time, John Rourke had planned ahead. Beneath the arctic parka he wore thermal underwear, a cotton knit shirt, dry BDU pants, the Mid-Wake equivalent of a Wol-ley Pulley. The cold weather pants that went with the parka helped considerably, as did the arctic boots. He had never been the kind of man who liked hats and habitually avoided them, so beneath the hood of his parka he wore a silk neck scarf, long like the ones aviators of the first two world wars had sometimes worn, but black. Wound over his head and around his neck to cut the wind, it was a gift from the premier of the First Chinese city.
Beneath the arctic gloves he wore black silk gloves, identical to the scarf, a comfortable and precise fit to his hands. With them, he could untie a small knot or pick up a dime, had anyone made dimes any more. He made a mental note to investigate the currency of Mid-Wake. Aside from knots and coins, the gloves were as good as bare skin on a gun and protected the hands from wind like none other he had ever used. He experimented with them as he walked.
As he walked, on one level his attention focused on the possibility of a chance encounter with more personnel fleeing this mysterious installation, on another level he kept his mind involved in order to minimize the mental discomfort associated with exertion in such cold. He reviewed the steps for various surgical procedures he had not recently performed or had never been called to perform other than on a cadaver when in medical school. When these became no longer so demanding of his concentration, he began to review the surgical procedures mentioned in the German and Mid-Wake journals he had been given to peruse. They were so forthrightly logical in some cases that he was amazed at his own obtuseness and that of other physicians of his era for never having tried them, nor thought to.
He dearly wanted the opportunity to practice medicine, more than he had ever wanted it in his life. Techniques existed now which conferred healing powers upon the physician that in earlier ages-like that in which he’d been schooled—would have seemed virtually miraculous. The power to save lives was greater than it ever had been.
Why was his own life, then, so consumed with-the taking of lives?
John Rourke kept walking, at last in the distance seeing a darker shape against the darkness.
As he advanced against it, he left the M-16 in its German assault rifle drop case. The Detonics .45s were accessible to him quickly enough and he had no intention of walking into trouble. He took a tangent from the natural trail in the rocks, slipping as he scrambled upward, catching himself, continuing onward, toward the ridge line lost in the darkness above him. He wanted to see what he was walking into. As he glanced northward, the shape seemed more defined, no more discernible as to its nature. He kept climbing.
CHAPTER TEN
ther and farther away—had agreed to try some preliminary experiments the next day.
There was another urgency to the matter. Should her father or husband reach Mid-Wake before the procedure were begun, either of them might forbid it.
Then what would she do?
She didn’t want to find that out.
Annie Rourke Rubenstein spoke to Natalia, her voice low, her eyes closed. “I’m coming. I’m coming to help you. And I may need you to help me, Natalia. But I’m coming anyway.”
Annie opened her eyes. She took her hands out of her pockets. She walked out of the room.
Annie Rubenstein stood at the foot of Natalia’s bed, her hands in the pockets of her skirt, her eyes on Natalia’s face. Her friend was lost. She might have the ability to bring her friend home. In such simple terms as that, it was more easily reasoned. If a person were lost, and lost somewhere where there might be danger, it was inherent to the situation that to go out and attempt to find the person and bring the person back might have some danger to it as well.
She remembered when she had first awakened her father, her mother, Paul, and Natalia from the Sleep, simply because Michael was lost and in danger.
Finding Michael had been accomplished.
This was the same. Only this time, her father was not the one to go searching. She was. No one could do this job better than she, because she knew Natalia intimately and, alone, had the ability to penetrate the territory into which Natalia had dis
appeared.
No special knife. No special gun. Not even a compass. She’d doubted she would really need the hypnosis, but at least in that way there might be someone to help bring her back should she, too, become lost.
Doctor Rothstein, perhaps out of embarrassment that she had so clearly read his thoughts, or perhaps out of a true perception of the urgency—Natalia was slipping far-
CHAPTER ELEVEN
From the top of the ridgeline, John Rourke could see the installation clearly enough, but its nature was still something which he could not discern. Mesh fences, plastic sheeting staked out near to the fences, like snow fencing, but inadequate to the task, it seemed. There was a blockhouse or bunker within the fenced area. And there, in open view, on either side of the bunker, were batteries of what appeared to be missile launching tubes from a nuclear submarine, the ends capped.
What he was looking at was a nuclear missile installation, at least twelve missiles total complement.
The door of the blockhouse was open, yellow light diffusing in the swirling snow.
John Rourke stood up, for the moment consciously oblivious, if such were possible, of any danger to himself.
He started walking along the ridgeline, looking for the nearest point where he could begin his descent. At last, he found a natural defile. Slowly, lest he slip on the ice and break something, he began climbing downward.
“This is the submarine. Aircraft crew, do you read me? Over.” It was the voice of Jason Darkwood from the Island Class submarine Arkhangelsk.
Paul Rubenstein put down his journal and grabbed up the headset. “This is the aircraft. Reading you loud and clear, submarine. Over.”
“Aircraft. Are you all right? Over.”
“We’re surviving the storm but unable to take off because of high winds. We were forced down due to mechanical problems since corrected. We have some company here, possibly, but at least we weren’t lonely. Eight visitors were made to leave abruptly. Do you Roger that? How are things on your end? Over.”
Darkwood’s voice came back. “There was an engagement, but everything worked out satisfactorily. What do you want us to do to help? Over.”
“Be there if we need you. I have no more information. Over.”
“I Roger that. Wilco. Out.”
Paul Rubenstein put down the headset. He looked at his watch. It was a German made digital given him by Otto Hammerschmidt. And John Rourke had been gone for a long time.
John Rourke, the M-16 freed of its case and in his right hand, ran a zigzag pattern through the ice and snow toward the fence. The gate was open.
He could see the missile tubes more clearly now, angled obliquely to the invisible sky above, the far side of each tube ice encrusted, but the near sides not. Cocoon-like cylinders lay open in the ground, as if the tubes had risen from them. The closer he approached, the less doubt Rourke experienced that they had. There
was a klaxon sounding, so faintly it could hardly be heard over the keening of the wind.
The gates to the compound were open.
John Rourke hesitated beside them, realizing he could be walking into something. But the sounding of the klaxon, the Marine Spetsnaz personnel who had been sufficiently afraid of something to attempt to escape into the storm, almost too weary to fight for their lives.
He thought of the entry in the diary which he and Paul had taken from one of the dead men. A destruct mechanism. An installation. For what?
The tubes.
John Rourke broke into a dead run, toward the shaft of diffused yellow light emanating from within the bunker.
The klaxon was louder now.
He slipped in the ice, caught his footing, lurched ahead, the M-16 tight in his right fist. The bunker doorway.
John Rourke flattened himself beside it, the M-16 shifting to his left hand, his right tugging down his zipper, then drawing the Smith & Wesson Model 629 from the flap holster beneath his parka.
Rourke moved into the doorway opening, the assault rifle and the .44 Magnum revolver ready.
Three men lay dead on the floor, the exposed flesh of their bodies gray, wounds visible, but the* blood coagulated in the bizarre patterns only freezing imparted.
A fourth man sat at a control panel, lights moving on it.
The man was shot once in the head. There was no one else in the large, single room structure. John Rourke moved to the control panel. The missiles were set to launch.
No time to close the door. Rourke safed the M-16 and propped it against the table as he shoved the dead man from the chair and to the floor.
The 629 went onto the counter before the control panel. Rourke’s left hand pushed back the parka hood and the scarf, his ears, the exposed skin of his face suddenly very cold. He was tired from lack of sleep, needed the rush the cold would give him. In a short while, the cold would bring on numbness, sleepiness. But in a shorter while—his eyes scanned the instruments—the missiles would launch and everything would be over anyway.
He pulled off the arctic outer gloves, the black gloves beneath them sensitive enough for the work.
A destruct system.
What had the dead man meant with his diary entry? That the destruct system might detonate the missiles? Or, was it so powerful a system that it would kill anyone nearby?
Had the eight Marine Spetsnaz personnel—two of the dead men here were officers—abandoned the facility out of fear of the launch, or the mechanism?
John Rourke had to know. He searched the panels, reading each gauge. There was a timer. Was it for destruct or launch? The diode reading showed minutes descending, seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds.
He tried to understand the scenario. An intentional launch or, due to inexperience with this land-based system, an accident?
If it was an accident, then the destruct mechanism would have been engaged as a last-ditch effort to abort the missiles.
Did the Soviet power based beneath the sea want to launch now? Against Mid-Wake? Wouldn’t the missile impacts destroy the very volcanic vent from which both cities drew geothermal energy?
Did the Russians think that way?
John Rourke holstered his revolver, dropped to his knees beneath the counter and started dismantling the access space at the front of the cabinet.
Launch or destruct?
He made the sign of the Cross.
He started tracking wires.
If there was a single nuclear detonation, because of the fragility of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, the earth would be destroyed. Twelve missiles here.
Were they about to fire?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Annie Rubenstein sat up. She had fallen asleep despite the headache, exhausted. But the headache was still with her, more intense.
She’d been dreaming.
She was the only one of them who dreamed consciously since the Awakening. And when she dreamed, she saw. Her father.
Her nightgown was stuck to her body with sweat. She hugged the blankets up around her. Her father.
Long tubes rising out of the ground and thrusting upward into the darkness.His hands moving. A sound.
The sound was loud, maddening in its intensity.
Wires and lights and switches, a jumble of them, bewil-deringly complex.
His hands moved over the wires. He was thinking about her, about her mother, Sarah, her brother Michael, about Paul, about Natalia. He didn’t know what to do. All the wires.
And there were red lights which formed a pattern, a pattern of numbers and the numbers were changing. The sound was becoming more intense.
Then the dream ended. Annie Rubenstein’s mouth was dry. Chills ran along her spine and across the top of her head. “Daddy.”
She closed her eyes, sitting there in the darkness. She knew.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The transceiver signal was weak, but the voice was clearly John’s. “Paul. Get the helicopter airborne, somehow. Make a pass toward the north of the island. There’s a concrete blockhouse surro
unded by a fence. Twelve missile tubes, six on each side. If you see me in the yard and can land, do it. If I’m not there, just fly off and—just fly off. Are you in contact with the Arkhangelsk? Over.”
“John. What’s going on? Yes—I’m in contact. What’s wrong?”
“Alert the Arkhangelsk to contact Mid-Wake and take whatever precautions can be taken to evacuate. Twelve missiles here. They’re about to fire, Paul.” Paul Rubenstein dropped the radio handset, his stomach suddenly gone. “There’s a destruct circuit. I think I’ve got it. When it goes, this island will go with it because of the fuel in the rocket engines. That’s all right. But the missiles might launch before the destruct sequence takes over. The men we saw. They were trying to escape the island. The missiles were supposed to launch. I think it was some kind of mistake. And they sabotaged the destruct mechanism that would abort the missiles because they knew the island would go up and they’d go with it. They killed their senior noncoms and officers here. No time now. Look for me.
Out.” “John! John! John!”
Paul Rubenstein licked dry lips with a dry tongue. He put the handset down and put on the radio headset, his hands moving over the gunship’s controls as he began to talk. “This is aircraft calling the Arkhangelsk. Come in, Darkwood. Over.”
“Aircraft. What is wrong? Over.”
“Everything,” Paul Rubenstein said, his throat tight, the rotor blades overhead increasing their speed of revolution. “Everything is wrong.” The cables would have to be disconnected before he could even attempt to unlock the helicopter’s pontoons from the ice… .
A speaker built into the wall on the far side of the bedroom crackled. The voice was pre-recorded, very calm, a woman’s voice a little higher than her own. “Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Emergency. This is not a drill. Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Move to your pre-designated stations as quickly and calmly as possible. There is ample time to evacuate. Remember, remain calm and more lives will be saved. Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Emergency. This is not a drill. Emergency …”