by Ahern, Jerry
Crouching lower as the German small arms fire conveniently increased in volume, Natalia took one of the Soviet grenades from her equipment harness. It was similar in outward design to the American baseball grenades of five centuries ago. A cotter pin of some plastic material kept the spoon attached to the body. She glanced over her shoulders on either side, her “comrades” clustered in small groups, some returning fire, most hiding behind cover.
The Bali-Song.
She opened it slowly so there wouldn’t be any noise. Inverting the grenade, propping it over a fragment of paving from the street, she levered downward with the Bali-Song’s primary edge, cutting through the plastic cotter pin, leaving its end flush against the juncture with the spoon so no pin showed.
She closed the Bali-Song now and pocketed it, drew the issue bayonet from her gear, then wedged it beneath the handle of the spoon, between the handle and the grenade’s body. She pried upward, her right hand squeezed hard around the bayonet’s hilt. “Let it be pot metal,” she almost prayed.
The bayonet was starting to bend, but the spoon handle snapped, flicking away.
Without hesitating, Natalia rolled the harmless grenade into the midst of the men around her, making her voice as deep as she could when she shouted, “Grenade! Run, comrades!”
She started to run, glancing back, the men who’d been around her dispersing in all directions.
Two men ran in the direction of the machine gun emplacement.
Natalia fired her assault rifle in two short bursts, killing them, German small arms fire rippling across the pavement near her feet. One of the men behind the machine gun raised up, stabbing a pistol toward her. She fired, stitching him from abdomen to throat.
The second man in the machine gun team swung the weapon toward her.
Natalia fired again, a long burst into his neck and face, knocking his body back. She threw herself toward the machine gun.
Two Elite Corps men charged toward her.
She pulled one of the Smith & Wesson L-Frames from beneath her BDU blouse and shot one man in the chest, the second in the neck, stabbing the revolver into her waistband as she swung the machine gun on line with the nearest knot of Elite Corpsmen and opened fire, spraying the machine gun across their position, killing or wounding nine of them. She swung the muzzle of the machine gun, firing long bursts at every Elite Corps position within reach, firing, firing.
And she screamed in German, “Attack! Attack!”
Natalia swept the hat back from her head, her hair cascading down, her right finger pressed against the machine gun’s trigger… .
Jason Darkwood said, “Well, not in perfect condition, granted, but I think we can establish contact with the other two Island Classers. Michael, why don’t you?”
“Right,” Michael Rourke nodded.
Jason Darkwood added, “Make sure to find out, Michael, which submarine may have our people in control and which may have a Soviet commander still at the helm.”
“Okay, Jason.”
Darkwood merely shook his head, John Rourke watching him. Darkwood’s face would have been amusing—just seeing how the man was trying to cope with a bridge crew of largely inept amateurs —except that the survival of New Germany and the Allied cause depended on whether or not he could get the Island Classer’s missiles turned against the Soviet land forces while at the same time avoiding a batde with one or both Island Classers near them.
Darkwood turned to Sam Aldridge. “How are we on weapon’s systems, Sam?”
“We’ve got a full complement of cluster charges to port and starbord, and a full complement of torpedoes fore and aft, and nineteen missiles remaining. None of the warheads nuclear, as far as I can tell, Jase.”
Darkwood said. “Very well. Adjust targeting to the last available coordinates for the Soviet land force. All of the missiles”
“Yes, sir!”
Han Lu Chen, at the sonar console, volunteered, “As far as I could tell, Captain Darkwood, one of the Soviet undersea boats has turned around.”
” ‘Coming about’ is the proper terminology, Mr. Han.”
Michael Rourke sang out, “Jason, I’ve got confirmation that the Island Classer nearest to us is in Allied hands. Evidently, the third team got stopped.”
Jason Darkwood looked down at his hands, and whispered, “There were a lot of good men in that third team. Shit. Mr. Rourke, if your Russian can manage it, signal the third Island Classer to surrender now. No terms except that their lives will be spared. Period. Don’t wait for a response. On the same frequency, signal Island Classer number two to prepare to fire starboard side cluster charges on my command. The full complement, and prepare for firing torpedoes fore and aft at their discretion.”
“But will they know how?”
“Of course not,” Darkwood told Michael Rourke, “but the Russians won’t know that.”
“I’m on it,” Michael shouted back.
Darkwood turned to Paul Rubenstein, at the engineering console. “Mr. Rubenstein, how’s it coming getting some control over this litde submarine we’ve inherited?”
Paul, crouched beneath the console, called back, “I think I’ve got enough things wired together that we have a full range of motion, Jason.”
Darkwood nodded, saying, “Very good, Mr. Rubenstein. Be ready to push the right buttons and pull the right switches when I indicate.” Darkwood turned to Michael Rourke again, saying, “Repeat the command again for surrender; don’t wait for response; make a big show of talking to Island Classer number two about releasing that full complement of starboard side cluster charges in the next twenty seconds. Then listen for Island Classer number three to surrender—I hope.” He looked at Sam Aldridge. “Sam, you ready to fire some of those missiles at the Soviet ground force position?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Darkwood looked at John Rourke, asking, “Doctor, do you have indicator lights showing that we’re basically in one piece enough to fire a missile without ripping ourselves apart?”
John Rourke smiled, saying, “I have green lights on all watertight doors linking major compartments”—he glanced at the weapons station, then looked back at Darkwood—“and fore and aft torpedo tubes all show to be sealed.”
Darkwood looked at the watch on his left wrist, asking, “Michael, any word from our Soviet neighbors?”
Michael answered, “Nothing yet … hey! Wait a minute! Yeah, I’m getting a message now from Island Classer three that they are standing down.”
Darkwood called back, “Order Island Classer number three to cease all navigation at once and order Islander Classer number two to keep those cluster charges ready to fire. Also, they should be prepared to fire torpedoes as necessary should the Island Classer recommence navigation.” He looked at Sam Aldridge, saying, “Sam, let’s pound hell out of that Soviet land force. Fire those missiles one every sixty seconds until I say otherwise.”
There was dead silence on the bridge and then the Island Classer seemed to vibrate as the first missile fired.
John Rourke watched the engineering station. The submarine was holding together if the readouts were correct… .
As Germans swarmed toward her position, Natalia stood up, throwing both hands in the air, shouting in German to them, “I am Major Tiemerovna! I am Major Tiemerovna! Do not shoot!”
German Long Range Mountain Patrol personnel formed a ring around her, faces startled, guns lowering, a man pushing through, calling to her, “Fraulein Major! I salute you!” It was Colonel Mann, his usually impeccable uniform smoke-smudged, his hat gone, an assault rifle in his hands. “Missiles are striking Soviet positions where troops were massed for assault on the city. Three of my armored units are blocking entry to the city. The Soviet commanders can only withdraw toward the sea!”
“John,” Natalia whispered.
And she sank to her knees and started to laugh, tears rimming her eyes. …
John Rourke stood on the deck of the Island Classer, sea spray washing over
her bow as he focused his binoculars toward shore.
J7-Vs crisscrossed the beach and German helicopters swarmed out of the setting sun.
All three Island Class submarines were now in Allied hands, Jason Darkwood commanding and essentially navigating all three from the Con of this one on which John Rourke stood, renamed The Freedom and, unofficially, the first vessel in an Allied Navy.
Soviet land force units not already destroyed by conventionally armed missiles fired from the Island Class submarine Freedom were withdrawing under the pressure of German armor and air power, withdrawing toward the sea.
They would have no choice but to surrender or die.
Rourke turned up the collar of his borrowed coat, inhaling smoke from the thin, dark tobacco cigar clamped in the left corner of his mouth, the binoculars hanging now from his neck.
Radio transmissions from the mountain city indicated that Sarah, Annie, and Maria, as well as the other women who had been in the Leader Bunker, were alive and well, despite the destruction of National Defense Headquarters above the bunker. Evacuation was even now underway.
And Natalia rode with Colonel Mann, Wolfgang Mann personally commanding his forces as they pressed the Germans toward the sea. Soon all three Island Class submarines would depart for the Soviet Underwater City, to aid in interdicting—God willing—Soviet nuclear retaliation. Already, Mid-Wake vessels—the Reagan, the Wayne, the captured Island Classer Roy Rogers, and others—were ringing the Soviets, containing only—or hoping to—until the full strike would be launched.
That would be within days, a two-pronged strike against both the underwater Soviet complex and the heart of Soviet power in the Urals. And that would end it, one way or the other, Rourke realized.
But, for another hour or so, John Thomas Rourke had nothing to do but watch the sunset and the preparations for terminating this skirmish in what might still become Armageddon.
Chapter Forty-three
There had been a few skirmishes but nothing more, the majority of the Soviet land force surrendering without significant resistance when faced with German air power above, German troops on the ground behind them, and the captured Soviet Island Classers along the shore.
The problem of what to do with prisoners was a significant one. After seizing the Cons of two of the Soviet Island Class submarines, then flooding all compartments with the very gas the Soviets utilized as an intruder defense system—a knockout gas, nonlethal—the question of handling significant numbers of prisoners had first reared its head. After the surrender of a major Soviet land force, the situation became critical.
Camps were being set up, the problems of sanitation and medical care wresded with, security for the camps surprisingly the easiest of the complexly interlocking issues with which to deal. There was a valley some thirty miles inland from the coast, the climate benign enough because of low elevation, the surrounding ground high with clear fields of view. Minimal numbers of troops would be required to contain vast numbers of prisoners.
John Rourke, with Paul Rubenstein beside him, stood on a grassy slope overlooking a level area about the size often football fields, the valley where hourly more and more of the captured Soviet combatants were arriving only a few miles farther inland.
Twelve devices, each about the size and shape of a U.S. M-60 machine gun from the days Before the Night of The War, were being taken up into the hands of twelve persons, two among these Michael and Natalia.
All of the objects were hand-fabricated. Cost, Rourke mused, had to have been enormous, but under the circumstances was wholly academic.
In all, there were twenty-four of the rather unwieldy shoulder-fired energy weapons, each powered by a back pack unit which, with John Rourke’s limited knowledge of physics, seemed to closely approach the idea of harnessing naturally occurring plasma energy, as seen in ordinary lightning and ball lightning. And, there was a certain irony to this that escaped neither Rourke nor, he felt, his friend Paul Rubenstein, as they watched this second round of field testing.
“It’s interesting to see Michael firing that weapon, isn’t it, John? Lightning harnessed in his hands, yet it was lightninglike energy as the result of the ionization effect which nearly destroyed his world five centuries ago.”
“By plasma energy, mankind was nearly undone. Now, by plasma energy, mankind may yet be saved.” John Rourke nodded. He lit a cigar, watching the simple synth-fuel-powered flame of his battered Zippo. And synth fuel, after all, was nothing more than a synthetic copy of naturally occurring fossil fuel, a wheel striking a natural piece of flint, making a spark, igniting that fuel, and fire being tamed, at man’s command for his every whim.
No less amazing and nearly as basic in their obedience to the laws of nature, really, were these energy weapons. And, aside from the triggering device, they were no more mechanical than his Zippo.
Only the triggering mechanism was mechanical.
Based on the original Soviet Particle Beam technology developed in the years before The Night of The War, which was never fully implemented, the plasma energy had initially been used to accelerate particles. But with this current technology, the plasma energy itself became the weapon.
It was based on the theory of the glow discharge … the inverse of the principle utilized in magnetohydrodynamic power generation. By pulsing magnetic fields in the plasma, beams of energy in relation to the square of the magnetic field were achieved. The glow discharge occurred between two electrodes. Whereas during The Great Conflagration, high amounts of plasma energy from enormously powerful currents in the ionized atmosphere all but destroyed the planet,
the glow discharge based on a comparatively minimal current produced a degree of ionization that was controllable, and in conjunction with a rather imaginative application of Landau Damping to control wave amplitude, the result was a gun that discharged lightning bolts, rather like the shepherds of ancient Greece had imagined were hurled by an angry Zeus.
Ionizing the electrons near the cathode within the system activated plasma near the anode. What originally had charged ions for partical beam weaponry and was still being used by the Russians to generate laser beams now was able to combine the more conventional glow discharge into the more spectacular electric discharge arc. In chemistry or physics, the implications of such practical technology were nearly beyond Rourke’s imagining—everything from drive systems for spacecraft to an infinite power supply bypassing the traditional steam/mechanical engine. But the potential of this energy as a weapon was crystal clear.
Within months, at an accelerated rate of development, the power supply pack would be miniaturized, and rather than the ungainly shoulder-fired weapons being tested in this deserted field outside the German mountain city, there would be hand and shoulder weapons as convenient as cartridges in the high-capacity 9mm pistols and 5.56mm assault rifles in use five centuries ago.
The age of the “ray gun” had arrived.
John Rourke watched his son as the range was called safe for firing and Michael raised his weapon, took aim, and fired on a man-sized silhouette some two hundred meters distant. There was a laser sighting device mounted to the energy weapon, and if the laser beam could be settied on the target clearly enough to be seen, the target could be hit. In bright light, as was the case now, an optical sight built into the carrying handle was utilized. Michael leaned into the weapon and fired. A lightning bolt—pale blue in color and almost blindingly bright—discharged from the weapon’s muzzle, striking the target.
“Welcome to the future,” Paul observed.
“Yes, but ours or theirs?” And John Rourke nodded his head inland, toward the valley in which the Soviet prisoners were to be held until this war reached its inevitable conclusion. Just what that conclusion might be, who would win, was subject of so many variables that a scenario for its outcome was not readily apparent.
And if the Soviets launched nuclear weapons from their enclave beneath the Pacific, there would be no world remaining at all.
Joh
n Rourke examined the glowing tip of his cigar.
Chapter Forty-four
John Rourke stared down into the water thousands of feet below the J7-V in which he rode. It was the wrong ocean, of course, the Adantic rather than the Pacific, but he could imagine Jason Darkwood piloting the new Allied Fleet of commandeered Soviet Island Class submarines toward a rendezvous in the Pacific with the men of Mid-Wake.
But John Rourke’s affairs took him elsewhere. Jason Darkwood and the United States Marines of Mid-Wake, plus a core group of Allied Commandos, would assault the Soviet underwater facility in the Pacific, to interdict Soviet nuclear strike capability in support of Soviet land forces headquartered out of the Underground City in the Urals. And the Ural Mountains of Soviet Europe were John Rourke’s ultimate destination.
First, a strike at Antonovitch’s field HQnear where, five centuries ago, the Volga River had met the Caspian Sea. But the bombings had altered the course of the Volga, and the entire area from what had been the bed of the Volga to the still-flowing Ural River was now icy desert.
The Soviet Union’s greatest airfield was there, as well as the greatest concentration of personnel and equipment outside of the Underground City itself. At Gur’yev were assembled the armies once commanded by Natalia’s now-dead husband, Vladmir Karamatsov. At Gur’yev was the headquarters for the KGB Elite Corps. At Gur’yev were five armored battalions and two armored missile battalions.
With Gur’yev, there was no hope to counter the Soviet war machine.
Without Gur’yev, there was a chance.
Twenty-four operational plasma energy weapons against how many dozens or hundreds, perhaps … John Rourke looked away from the water, studyingthe charts on the screen of the German lap-top computer.
There was no other way than the way he had decided upon when first presented with the tactical difficulties involved.
John Rourke closed his eyes.
Chapter Forty-five
They sat around a rectangular folding table of considerable length. Natalia Tiemerovna studied the faces there. Wolfgang Mann looked exceedingly tired, spread too thin, much like the nation of New Germany he served. Paul looked almost anxious to be under way. Like her, with five centuries of warfare coming to a close, the prospect of peace—regardless of the dangers inherent in securing it—was so tantalizing that …Sheaverted her gaze from Paul as he looked up. They exchanged the briefest of smiles.