Countdown

by Jerry Ahern

  As she went to set down the brush, she dropped the brush, sucked in her breath so fast that it sounded like a scream, then almost collapsed.

  “Annie!” Paul was kneeling beside her, his journal and a pen going to the floor beside her knees. Her knees were cold, bare against the tiles of the bathroom floor, her nightgown billowed out around her. “Annie? What is it, sweetheart?”

  It wasn’t the sort of vision that was really clear, just a feeling, and the visions that were strong feelings were usually the worst kind. She licked her lips, trying to catch her breath.

  “It’s Daddy. Something wrong—”

  “Can you see where he is?”

  “No—but—he’s sleeping, I think. Paul?”

  “I’m on my way. Lock yourself in after I’m gone. Your guns are on the writing desk.”

  And Paul was gone.

  Annie knelt there.

  The door slammed.

  She closed her eyes, trying to force herself to have the strength to stand and lock the cabin door.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Paul Rubenstein’s guns were in his hands as he ran along the companionway.

  He should have told Annie to—to do what? Arouse her father from his sleep? But that might only hasten whatever danger John was in. Call Michael and Natalia, even Emma Shaw? Annie’d probably do that, anyway.

  He ran past a knot of sailors. “Mr. Rubenstein? Sir! What’s the matter, sir?” He ignored them, kept running. Shirtless, shoeless and sockless, Paul Rubenstein was quietly amazed that he’d remembered to pull on a pair of BDU pants. They were buttoned, but his belt was flapping open. He must have looked like a wild man, a pistol in each hand, cocked and locked, half-naked, running. He turned the right angle into the section of companionway along which John’s cabin was situated …

  Elwood Brooks watched Commander Shaw as, at last, she stirred. He carried two gas pistols, improvised here aboard the Paladin, as were the cartridges which they contained. The pistol he had fired at Commander Shaw when she opened her cabin door was loaded with what would generically be called knock-out gas, a combination of chemicals which induced instantaneous unconsciousness without causing permanent damage. Not that that mattered, but he needed her alive so she could scream.

  The second pistol was loaded with cyanide gas. During the Cold War between the superpowers centuries ago, cyanide gas pistols had been extremely popular as a means of committing murder. This was his intention now. Ideally, according to what Elwood Brooks had read, the subject should be ascending a staircase when the cyanide was fired, so that the conditions of a massive coronary occlusion, which the gas simulated, would be further substantiated by the activity of the deceased in the instants prior to death.

  There was no staircase at hand, but that would be all right. It was doubtful that anyone would believe that Dr. John Thomas Rourke, the living legend that he was, had succumbed from something as mundane as heart failure. But, the murder could not be provably linked to an assailant.

  Brooks’s hands were double-gloved, guarding against laser detection of partial fingerprints through ordinary gloves. The gas guns were made from a plastic with a low melting point and would be destroyed.

  Both guns were loaded now with the cyanide gas in the event that one burst should not be enough to bring down the powerful Dr. Rourke as instantaneously as required. And, Brooks had spare cartridges. One of those would be used to kill Commander Shaw. But, he needed her awake for now, so that Dr. Rourke would come rushing through the connecting doorway between their cabins when she screamed.

  And, she would be screaming in just another few seconds.

  In order to get a seasoned Combat veteran to scream for help, Elwood Brooks had considered various possibilities. There were a few laboratory animals aboard the Paladin. He could have employed the most potentially objectionable of these laboratory animals, of course. Would she have screamed if she awakened with a rat sitting on her face? Probably, but Elwood Brooks disliked rats in the extreme.

  He elected instead to utilize something with which he was considerably more familiar: acid.

  He removed the vial of acid from the container in which it was carried under his sweater.

  The instant Commander Emma Shaw awakened, he would begin to use the acid on her face. She would scream.

  John Rourke would enter hurriedly.

  By that time, Elwood Brooks would be waiting beside the door and fire the gas pistol. Then he would kill Commander Shaw and leave.

  The scream would be heard, but there should be time to escape into the anonymity of the ship’s company. Should John Rourke kill him as Rourke went down, so be it. No sacrifice was too great for the cause of National Socialism.

  Elwood Brooks stood over the bound form of Commander Shaw.

  He uncorked the acid vial.

  Her face was very pretty in a real sort of way, nothing artificial about the woman.

  He would pour the hydrochloric acid onto the left side of her face, at the cheekbone, near her left eye.

  She would react.

  Dr. John Rourke would react.

  Then, Dr. John Rourke would cease to exist.

  Elwood Brooks started, ever so slowly, to tip the vial.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Paul Rubenstein reached John Rourke’s cabin door. If someone were inside, about to kill John, knocking on the door might only speed up the process.

  Paul Rubenstein made his decision.

  He stepped back from the cabin door, the safeties downed on his High Powers, fourteen rounds loaded in each.

  Taking a deep breath, Paul kicked out with his right foot against the cabin door’s lockplate, the technique for the kick taught to him by Natalia.

  The lock splintered away from the synth-wood door jamb and the door swung inward as Paul Rubenstein went through.

  John, naked, was already rolling out of the bunk where he’d slept, the little Centennial .38 Special in his right hand. “Paul?”

  “It was Annie—she sensed that you were in danger and—”

  There was a scream from the cabin next door.

  “My God,” John rasped, grabbing up one of the twin stainless Detonics pistols from the nightstand beside him as his body went into motion. The Centennial was in his other hand. He was moving toward the adjoining door, Paul two steps behind him, John making a wheeling barefoot kick with his left foot, knocking the adjoining door off the jamb, the door slamming inward.

  Emma Shaw, trussed up hand and foot with strips of bedsheet, lay on her back in her bunk, smoke rising from the pillow under her head.

  There was a puff of smoke inches away from John’s face. There was the sound of a gunshot, from John’s .45.

  John began collapsing into a heap.

  There was a blur of motion, the dark shape of a slender man.

  Paul Rubenstein fired both Browning High Powers simultaneously, double tapping both 9mms, the man-shape spinning round, hurling something toward Paul Rubenstein’s face.

  Paul threw himself right and down, over John’s body to protect his friend from whatever it was.

  The strange figure fell to his knees as Paul stabbed the pistol from his left hand toward the man and fired again, spraying it out into the spinal cord, killing him.

  The carpet beside Paul’s right hand smoked. There was broken glass there and Paul realized what the substance was which had been inside the vial: acid.

  Emma Shaw shrieked. “He killed John!”

  Paul Rubenstein rolled up to his knees, turning John over onto his back, away from the acid. There was no pulse in John’s neck and his eyes stared up at the overhead light.

  Paul Rubenstein stumbled back, shook his head, got to his feet. Throwing the emptied pistol onto the bed beside Emma Shaw, safing the still-loaded one and dropping it into the deep pocket at his right side, he reached for the woman with one hand, the bedside telephone with the other.

  The pillow beside her head smoked and it looked as if a little of her hair had been tou
ched by the acid; otherwise, she seemed unharmed.

  Paul shouted into the receiver. “This is Paul Rubenstein. Full cardiac team to Commander Shaw’s cabin on the double. John Rourke may be dead!”

  He slammed down the receiver, dropped to his knees beside his friend’s body and started CPR.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  No bra, no panties, no socks, wearing only a sweater, a pair of fatigue pants and her track shoes, Emma Shaw hammered her fist against the bulkhead.

  The pharmacist’s mate had cut away about two square inches of her hair on the left side and pronounced her whole and well. She’d had split ends there anyway.

  Meanwhile, the ship’s doctor had worked to revive John.

  Already inside a portable heart-lung machine, he was wheeled out the door and gone.

  The dead man, a civilian science worker named Elwood Brooks, was body-bagged and taken away on a stretcher. Paul Rubenstein was joined by Natalia and Annie and Michael Rourke, Annie and Michael and Paul following after John to sickbay.

  Natalia righted the cabin’s overturned desk chair and sat down. Wearing a baggy white sweater with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows, a loose-fitting, nearly ankle-length full skirt of navy blue cotton, little white anklet socks and blue ballet flats, Natalia looked lovely, as she always did, despite the hour and the circumstances. “Get dressed, Emma Shaw. You belong in sickbay with your man.”

  “But, they—”

  “If you were good enough for John, you’ll be good enough for them. I learned that six centuries ago. The Rourke Family—and that includes Paul, of course—doesn’t pull punches. If they didn’t like you, you would know about it by now. Resentment about Sarah? There is bound to be that, but Sarah’s ultimate goal in life was never to make herself a saint. If that’s Sarah alive down there in sickbay, she’ll understand. If John had realized years ago what he apparently realizes now, well—” And Natalia laughed. “I would have killed you if I’d had to, but in a fair fight, of course.” She stood up, walked over to where Emma Shaw stood beside the bed and embraced Emma, then kissed her on the cheek. “Just pull something on and let’s go, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “Good.”

  Emma Shaw pulled something on and went. Major Natalia Tiemerovna was the sort of woman who could pull anything on and look as if she’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine after spending hours achieving the perfect look. Emma Shaw had realized when she was just a teenager that she was not that kind of person. When she just pulled something on, it looked like she’d just pulled something on.

  Natalia sat beside Michael, her head against his shoulder on the long bench along the bulkhead opposite the doors to sickbay. Annie, wearing a long robe over a long nightgown, fuzzy slippers peeking out beneath its hem, sat on the bench along the opposite bulkhead. Paul, one foot resting on the bench, stood beside her.

  Emma Shaw felt very alone and very responsible.

  There was no word from the doctors, which evidently meant that John had not been pronounced.

  “Sarah!”

  It was Paul Rubenstein’s voice which Emma Shaw heard. She turned around, looking back along the corridor formed between the two benches. A uniformed Navy nurse was pushing a wheelchair, in the chair sitting a remarkably pretty woman with long auburn hair caught up loosely at the nape of her neck. She was pale, but seemed well somehow.

  Annie went to her, knelt at her feet, hugged her. Michael bent over her and kissed her. After a moment, Natalia went up to her, said something that Emma couldn’t catch, then leaned over and kissed her cheek. Paul crouched beside the chair, put his arms around her, held her for a moment.

  Then, her eyes met Sarah Rourke’s eyes and Emma Shaw shivered. This was the woman whose name every schoolchild knew, the woman who had kept her family together throughout all the violence and death in the aftermath of the Night of the War—kept it together only to have her husband stolen from her when her back was turned.

  Emma Shaw licked her lips and found them dry.

  Annie looked at her, smiled.

  A man stepped up beside Emma Shaw. When she turned to look at him, she recognized him as Wolfgang Mann. “General—”

  “Commander Shaw. You and I have a great deal in common, it seems. Share a cigarette with me, perhaps a cup of coffee. It is only the next room.”

  “Yes.”

  She felt his hand at her elbow and let him lead her away …

  Sarah Rourke wondered if her work had been done for her by some man whose name had been Elwood Brooks? Had he succeeded in killing the unkillable John Rourke?

  If not, she would still have to do it.

  Chapter Forty

  Emma Shaw’s coffee had no taste. Neither did the cigarette. But she drank the coffee and smoked the cigarette anyway.

  Wolfgang Mann—he’d told her, “Call me Wolf, Fräulein Commander Shaw”—lit another cigarette with the lighter on the table in front of him. “I have a lot of smoking to catch up on, Fräulein.”

  “Emma, please,” she said. “Call me Emma.”

  “Emma. You and John are—?” He let the question hang on the air like the smoke he’d just exhaled.

  “Are?”

  He smiled. “You have doubtless heard the rumors that Sarah and I—”

  “Yes. I’m very happy for you, if it works out. John told me that he thought you and Sarah were in love.”

  “We were, one hundred and twenty-five years ago.

  We never—but, ah—”

  Emma didn’t know what to say to him. Saying something like, “Well, John and I sure did and it was great!” would have been in terribly bad taste. Instead, she said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “I had wished the same for you and John. And, you should remember, Fräulein Commander—Emma. You should remember that John Thomas Rourke is an extraordinarily difficult man to kill.”

  She was doing a good job holding the tears in until he said the magic word, and the tears started flowing in spite of all her resolve to the contrary. She felt Wolfgang Mann’s arm moving to hold her at the shoulders and she let him. “I, ah—” But her throat closed up on her.

  Wolfgang Mann, his voice soft, almost whispered, “I know exactly how it is that you feel, Emma. My wife, whom I loved deeply, was murdered by the Nazis as a calculated act of terror. I found myself falling in love with Sarah Rourke, and thought that she might somehow have some feelings for me, and then she was essentially killed in the fire at the hospital, when the Nazis, once again, perpetrated an act of terror. I had nothing left. My children were dead, my wife murdered, and the woman I loved—but had told myself I could never possess—was also taken from me. The pain inside is impossible to bear, is it not?”

  Emma Shaw was biting her lower lip, nodded her head, her nose running, her eyes streaming tears, her head aching, body shaking.

  “I held a brief conversation with the Paladin’s chief of security. It was a rather close brush with death that you yourself endured, I understand.”

  Still unable to swallow, or to speak, Emma Shaw managed to nod her head. She didn’t care about herself, only John.

  “The weapon used was a cyanide gas pistol, I believe. Before the Night of the War, as I understand it, such a weapon, when properly used, was always fatal. But now, we live in an age of medical miracles, Fräulein! You should take heart. If John were dead, you would know by now.”

  She shook her head, managing to say, “They could, could still be trying—”

  “To revive him? To what end?”

  “I—”

  Then her world ended, or at least she thought that it did, because Emma Shaw looked toward the door into the waiting room and there stood Natalia Tiemerovna, eyes streaming tears.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Michael Rourke sat at the far side of the round table. He had selected a round table, he supposed, because as a boy he had read the stories of King Arthur, who had selected a round table so that no knight would assume himsel
f to be more important than any other.

  They were not knights at this table, nor would any of them assume themselves more important than the other, but it was a quest of epic proportions upon which they would all soon embark, all of them except Wolfgang Mann, who sat with them as well. He would look after Sarah Rourke while they were gone, for however long that would be.

  “Go ahead” Michael,” Paul said.

  Michael nodded. “All right. Paul and I figured this out kind of quickly, but we figure it’s the only way to save Dad’s life.”

  Emma Shaw sniffed loudly, used what was obviously a man’s handkerchief and blew her nose.

  Wolfgang Mann smiled a little apologetically.

  Michael went on. “All of us are part of the Family.” Emma Shaw looked pointedly at him and he at her. If he could have read lips, he would have sworn hers silently formed the words, “Thank you.” Natalia lit a cigarette.

  Michael said, “Our father has suffered irreparable heart damage as a result of the cyanide gas. According to the doctors, the preparation required for the proper adjustment and fitting of an artificial heart would consume a minimum of seventy-two hours. They can only keep him on the apparatus they’re using for another thirty-six hours without the risk of brain damage. They caught him barely in time as it was, but all their equipment indicates his brain survived intact. A human donor heart could be found, but considering the time constraints a good tissue match would be unlikely, meaning he’d possibly die anyway. I would give my own heart—” Michael could no longer speak.

  Paul spoke then, and Michael listened. “Michael spoke with Natalia and offered to give his own heart to save his father’s life. Natalia did not agree, but Michael decided to make the offer anyway. She was sensible. Michael was emotional. We all love John in our own ways. Anyway,” Paul continued, “there is one surefire source for a replacement heart that will be a perfect match in every way, identical to the original. If we can get to that source and make ourselves take it, we can save John’s life. Otherwise, John’ll be dead. I mean, he could be kept alive, but brain damage would set in and the John Rourke we knew would be dead, gone.