by Ahern, Jerry
There’d been times when money was tight in those early days, until he’d learned to manage it; but the gun had always stayed with him.
Yet, somehow, he took greater comfort from his knife. It was an identical duplicate, down to the metallurgy, of the Randall Smithsonian Bowie his ancestor had brought to Mid-Wake.
It had heritage.
And, it was personal.
It would be useless at twenty-five yards. But Freidrich Rausch would not come from twenty-five yards. Rausch would be close when and if Rausch came. Darkwood’s palms perspired. He waited.
When Sam Aldridge had said, “01 be back later, Jason; gonna check around some more,” Darkwood had been desirous of telling him, “Hey, Sam-don’t leave me alone here, huh? I’m spooked.” But, instead, he’d told his friend, Tm fine. Let me know how things are going, okay?”
And Sam Aldridge had gone.
Now Jason Darkwood waited alone in the darkness.
Chapter Eleven
John Rourke was beside the corridor wall, behind him a patient lounge. His hearing, always excellent despite his exposure over the years to so much gurifire without the benefit of hearing protection, enabled him now to almost pinpoint the origin of Rausch’s voice. This worried him. Why was Rausch being so careless?
A thought crossed John Rourke’s rnind, and the thought chilled him.
Cautiously, the pistol in his right fist, John Rourke reached out to touch his fingertips to the door handle. But, instead, he drew his hand back. Again, he thrust the pistol into his belt and took the Zippo from his pocket. The flashlight would have been easier to use but easier to spot from the other side of the doorway as well. Rourke shielded the lighter with his body to muffle any noise of striking flame, then dropped to a crouch beside the doorway, moving the lighter close to the handle. Leading out of the handle’s base were two thin pieces of wire. Turning the door handle would bridge the wires. Rourke’s lighter and his eyes followed the wires down to the base of the door, then along the base molding and along the wall. The wires ended at the wall outlet.
If he had opened the door without thinking, he would have electrocuted himself.
John Rourke felt a smile cross his face. Rausch had re-taught him a valuable lesson: And that was never to underestimate an enemy.
John Rourke unsheathed the LS-X knife and went to work on the wires.
Chapter Twelve
Jason Darkwood lay back in the bed, telling himself he had not heard a noise, that nothing was going to happen. There were two United States Marines on duty at the end of the hall and all of the connecting doors were blocked and locked.
He could hear the wind, his room on an outside wall of the central courtyard for the hospital. Doctor Munchen had explained to him, “We have always felt that psychological well-being is a great contributor to physical well-being. Often, a chance to experience the sunlight, the fresh air, a pleasant breeze, can be quite surprisingly therapeutic. With the modular construction of our field hospitals, it is very simple to merely leave out a center module, or even several, thus creating a central courtyard in which recuperating patients can experience a natural environment. Statistics indicate as high as a five percent reduction in overall hospitalization in hospitals using this technique, among a certain class of patients, of course. I feel its validity can best be tested against the opposite extreme. Here, in American Georgia as of late, the climate is so extreme that patients, no matter how otherwise hardy, cannot be exposed to the cold and the snow. Periods of hospitalization, based on preliminary raw data, with comparative wounds to comparative personnel, are of greater duration. But perhaps the snow wfll stop.”
This was Darkwood’s first truly prolonged experience on the surface, and the weather astounded him in its severity. That men constantly lived and worked and fought with such conditions of extreme cold, high winds and falling snows was a testimony to their character and their endurance.
Darkwood felt himself smile. He imagined a surface dweller would have marvelled equally at the adaptability shown by Mid-Wake personnel to a life-How could he classify the life of Mid-Wake? Enclosure? One was almost always enclosed, beneath the great domes of Mid-Wake itself, within the hull of one of Mid-Wakes vessels. Only a very few were ever able to escape enclosure, albeit for a brief period of time. Even swimming as part of a mission rarely took someone to the surface; and, while swirnming, one wore helmet and suit and was encased from head to toe, even the hands.
Suddenly, Jason Darkwood wanted to be in the cold, feel the wind, the snow.
He stood up-a httle too quickly-and held onto his nightstand.
Here he was a prisoner, really, enclosed within the walls of this room, within the larger confines of the building itself. There was a door leading to the outside. But logic dictated he not pass through it.
Prisoners of ice and snow and wind and prisoners of the sea were very much alike.
There was a sound, like something scratching against the outer door leading to the courtyard. It wasn’t like any of the sounds he had heard before, the howling of the wind, the creaking of the very building joints themselves at times.
Darkwood took up his pistol, stared at it.
Was it Rausch come to get him?
His right fist tightened on the butt of the Lancer 2418 A2. He wished he had some sort of missile at his command instead of just a pistol.
Jason Darkwood edged back from the door to the outside, crossing the room toward the door leading to the corridor. Was it merely the feet that it was “outside” beyond that door which somehow, on an almost primordial level, terrified him?
He had his hand reaching out for the door handle leading to the corridor, to an inside place, enclosed.
Darkwood stopped moving his hand.
If he touched that door handle, he would be giving in to the fear which had begun to grip him here, stalked by Rausch, trapped in an unfamiliar environment, one of unbridled hostility, his head and neck aching, medication for the pain coursing through his system.
Darkwood thrust his left hand into the pocket of his robe so he couldn’t reach for the door handle. He knew enough about the human body to know that things like fear and confidence were controlled by chemical triggers. Some chemical trigger-it had to
be the medication-was tying him in knots of indecision. But he could start other chemical triggers working. Brave men conquered their fear because they had no choice, not because they wanted to. He had no choice.
Jason Darkwood started walking-slowly because he couldn’t walk rapidly-toward the door to the outside. If Freidrich Rausch were waiting for him, then the thing would get over with quickly, one way or the other.
Darkwood gripped the pistol tighter.
Chapter Thirteen
It was a tape player, not modern like those of new Germany, but state-of-the-art for the era of John Rourke’s earlier life in the Twentieth Century. It was from one of the Eden Project supply caches.
“You must know, Herr Doctor, that you cannot win. Ours is an historic struggle. I have calculated your actual chronological age to arrive at the date of your birth. What a pity! I feel terrible sorrow for you that you were born only after the great hero of humanity was sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity as a sacrifice to the demagogues of the self-styled democracies. To have lived in those days when Der Fuhrer walked the earth like mortal man and to have breathed air that might have touched him-”
John Rourke pushed the button for stop and the tape machine clicked off.
Freidrich Rausch had been smarter than John Rourke’s reappraisal of the man’s capabilities had even suggested. Somewhere along the corridor, there would be a photo-electric eye or pressure sensitive strip. John Rourke’s having passed through or on whatever it was had activated the tape recorder’s play mechanism. Rausch had intentionally come here, to the most remote of the interior perimeter outposts. And killed.
Near Rourke’s feet, as he shone the light, were two bodies, throats slashed ear to ear, one body that of an Americ
an Marine from Mid-Wake, the other that of a commando of New Germany.
John Thomas Rourke took the cassette from the recorder. Something-some random sound in the background - anything might prove of some use.
And he ran.
Because Freidrich Rausch would be at the heart of the hospital complex, ready to kill Jason Darkwood, if Darkwood weren’t dead already…
Jason Darkwood’s head ached with the movement. Doctor Munchen had told him to expect some pain, even some disorientation under mental or physical stress. The blow to his head had been severe. He was feeling vaguely nauseated.
Darkwood’s palms sweated. Pain. Disorientation. Yes. He had both. And mere was a chemical reaction going on in his body that was making things very bad for him..
He touched his left hand to the locking bolt on the door leading to the outside, to the snowdrifted courtyard.
He slid the bolt back.
His left hand gripped the door handle, his right fist tightening on the butt of the 2418 A2.
“Open the door,” Darkwood told himself. “Ifs only a door. ItH be a little cold. Thafs all right. Anything out there, hey, no problems. I blow it away with this.” He held the pistol close by his right side. He wished he had one of the thirty-round magazines in it instead of only a fifteen. Then he would have had thirty-one shots instead of only sixteen.
He didn’t.
He twisted the door handle. The door was stack.
Darkwood tugged at it, a cold sweat breaking out over his kidneys, under his armpits, dizziness sweeping over him. He pulled harder and the door opened, an icy wind almost knocking him down, swirling around inside his hospital room like the terrestrial whirlwinds he had studied about in geography and climatology classes when he was a boy in school.
He shivered. “The wind,” Darkwood murmured.
Snow was drifted several feet high beside where the door had been and it formed a flange there now, at the base and on the left hand side of the doorframe as well, sculpted flat and smooth, grainy, textured too.
“Anybody out there?”
Only the wind replied …
John Rourke reached the center corridor running as he spoke into
the walkie-talkie. “He can hear us, Sam, hear us, I’d lay money on it. He can hear every word we say. He’s closing in on Darkwood right now, if he hasn’t gotten him already.”
“My two Marines-that mother fucker. They’re not answering!”
“Dead.One Marine and one German Commando dead on post five and probably more between there and Darkwood’s room. He’s good. He’s so good he’s scarey. We’re gonna get him. Hear that, Rausch? We’re gonna nail your ass.”
Rourke could hear Sam Aldridge’s breathing as Aldridge opened the frequency again. Aldridge was running …
Jason Darkwood stood in the doorway’s threshold, his left hand balled into a fist to keep his robe closed at his throat, his entire body trembling with cold and the dizzy feeling in his head. He called into the swirling snow and the darkness beyond the meager cone of white light from the doorway, his form silhouetted in it. “I know you’re out there. You want to kill me, then come ahead, you shit!”
Darkwood stepped through the doorway …
John Rourke had planned ahead.
If Freidrich Rausch had access to one tape recorder, he had equal access to many. If Freidrich Rausch realized that the first tape recorder would be discovered, he might assume that no one would in turn assume he would utilize a second tape recorder in the same way as the first, to draw someone to it, but this time for a totally different purpose.
John Rourke punched through the doorway into the vacant patient room across the central courtyard and opposite from the identical quarters occupied by Jason Darkwood.
Rourke ran to the window, pushed back the curtain. Jason Darkwood stood in the snow, just outside the open doorway leading from his room, shaky looking. It could be a reaction of adrenaline with the medication Doctor Munchen had administered to aid in Darkwood’s recovery.
And at the edge of the shaft of light flooding over the snow through the open doorway, inside the room, behind Darkwood, there was the figure of a man.
John Rourke couldn’t risk a shot.
Rourke looked to his right, the sliding hospital bed table so much like those used five centuries ago the nearest heavy object to hand. He grabbed it, wresting it free of the bed with his right hand as his left hand reached out for the door handle. He could hurtle the table through the open doorway into the courtyard and distract -
Rourke almost touched the door handle.
The flashlight from his belt. He grabbed it, letting the table rest against the wall.
Rourke dropped to a crouch beside the door handle, in the beam of the flashlight seeing the wires, the same as before, an obvious invitation to cut them. But, tracing them to the nearest outlet, Rourke saw another set of wires,4he first set a blind. As he moved, his right foot slipped a lhtle and as he shone the flash over the floor he detected a puddle of water, a wire set in its center. He followed the second collection of wires back toward the door handle; if he’d cut the first and obvious set, the second set would have gotten him.
John Rourke was out of time. He shoved the flashlight into his belt as he raised to his full height and swung the M-16 forward on its sling.
He could see Darkwood starting to turn around as the shadow of the man who stalked him obscured a portion of the shaft of light in which Darkwood stood.
John Rourke fired the M-16 through the synthetic transparent panel which served as a window to the courtyard, blowing it out in huge jagged chunks, spraying the 5. 56mm bullets across the base into which the glass-substitute was set so he could scramble through without ripping his clothing and the flesh beneath it to shreds. Darkwood was already wheeling toward the sound of gunfire, but not toward the shadow.
The M-16 empty, John Rourke let it fall to his right side on its sling, his right hand grasping for the butt of the six-inch barreled .44 Magnum revolver at his right hip.
He drew, starting the trigger squeeze as his right arm raised to shoulder height and his left palm cupped around his right fist.
The figure stepped out of the shadow, fully backlit now, a sinister silhouette with some sort of crossbow shouldered and ready to fire.
The figure-it had to be Rausch-ducked left as Darkwood, apparendy alerted by some sound or some movement, turned toward him. Perhaps the sound of the crossbow’s safety catch being flicked off, Rourke thought.
Rourke’s revolver discharged, the crossbow flying from the figure’s right hand, the figure falling back.
Rourke’s shot missed the intended target, the silhouetted figure’s center of mass.
Darkwood fired his pistol, the muzzle flash-lower with the caseless ammunition than with conventional gunpowders-a quick tongue of flame that endured for only an instant. There was an answering flash from inside the room and Darkwood stumbled back, fell into the snow as John Rourke vaulted through the shot out window and into the courtyard.
Darkwood was up on his elbow, firing the pistol again as Rourke reached him. “It was Rausch! Had to be!”
John Rourke heard the slamming of a door from inside.
“Get inside if you can. FH send help!” Rourke grabbed for his walkie-talkie. “Sam! This is Rourke. Rausch is in the corridor outside Darkwood’s room. Rausch tried and missed. He’s armed. Get help to Darkwood.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, hitting the doorway into the room, his clothes wet with snow from the brief seconds outside in the courtyard, the 629 in his right fist.
Rourke crossed the room in two long strides, grabbed up a chair from near the bed, returned to the open doorway and threw the chair through into the corridor.
A burst of automatic weapons fire tore through the seat back, almost severing the chair in two before it bit the corridor floor.
Rourke stabbed the 629 through the doorway and emptied the remaining five rounds from the cylinder in the direction from which
the gunfire had originated. He dropped the 629 into the Sparks holster and drew both Detonics Scoremasters, thumbing back the hammers as he went through the doorway, firing both pistols simultaneously, crossing the corridor to the doorway opposite but slightly nearer the origin of the gunfire, chunks of wall and doorframe spraying around him, Rourke’s eyes squinting against the cloud of debris.
There was something in his right eye. He blinked both eyes as he looked down at his pistols, both pistols still holding four rounds each. Backing deeper into the doorway, blinking his eyes to clear
the right one, Rourke stabbed both pistols toward Rausch’s position, firing them out, another hail of automatic weapons fire tearing into the doorframe.
Rourke thrust both pistols into his belt, the slides still locked open over the empty magazines. His right hand found the butt of the Colt Lawman at the small of his back, drawing it from the Rybka M.O.B. holster, punching the snubby .357 Magnum blindly down the corridor, firing as his left hand rolled back his right eyelid. Involuntary paroxysms traveled up his spine as he touched his left index finger to his eyeball. Rourke shrank from his own hand, the revolver empty. He blinked his eye, tears rolling from it.
The offending bit of building material was gone.
Rourke grabbed for his flashlight, flicking it on, staring into the light with his right eye, making the tears come more freely now. More gunfire. Rourke stuffed the Lawman into the right hip pocket of the black BDU pants he wore, shaking his head, both hands reaching for the litde Detonics Combat Masters under his armpits, ripping the miniaturized stainless steel .45s from the double Alessi rig-His thumbs jacked back the hammers and he punched both pistols around the doorframe simultaneously, firing a double tap from each.