by Ahern, Jerry
He pocketed the fifteen-round magazines, stuffed the two handguns between his gunbelt and his abdomen. The four-inch .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson was in the crossdraw holster between his navel and his left hip. He regioved, but only with the thinner liners, thumbing the M-16’s selector to auto.
Natalia was right that a batde rifle should be rarely used on auto, but he would be using his rifle like a submachine gun, for sweeping.
“Let’s go.”
Snow crunched beneath his boots as he started from their place of concealment behind a low ridge. Over their parkas, each of them wore a white snowsmock, but further precautions would have been useless.
The enemy knew they were coming, just not precisely when …
Paul Rubenstein edged along the dunes of drifted snow, the Schmiesser in his left hand, the M-16 in his right, his wife in his footsteps, a yard behind him when he looked back.
John was almost dead, and might remain that way, if he lived at all, for days or months or years or decades-perhaps centuries.
He would miss his friend more in those times to come than he did now, he knew, and to gauge a loss more acute than that, which he already felt, was incalculable.
John was friend and brother and mentor.
And Sarah, the deliberateness of what had been done to her, sickened his spirit.
This night, he wanted the enemy to be there, well-armed and ready, and he wanted to kill as many of them as he could.
That would not undo what had been done, and his motives
in wanting the confrontation were purely selfish, he knew, but it would feel good to kill these people, take some measure of revenge, however minuscule. How many of their lives lost forever would compensate for the loss of John Rourke or Sarah Rourke for even a second in infinity?
His wife, John and Sarah’s daughter, was consumed with these feelings as well, he realized, and he was happy for that. Because, once these feelings passed, she would feel the loss even more greatly.
If they found the child, would they raise him as their own? Would Annie’s brother grow up to think of his sister as a mother, his brother-in-law as a father?
What would they tell the boy. “Your real mom and dad aren’t really dead, they’re just-” What?
Paul Rubenstein shivered at such thoughts, of death without death, of life without life, going on forever until time stopped, perhaps…
Christopher Dodd looked out across the chamber’s vastness.
The floor surface of Eden One’s cargo bay was nine hundred square feet, and made a fine office to serve his needs of the moment. Among the Eden Project stores were a considerable number of highly sophisticated personal computer terminals, and these could be linked in series to increase their capabilities. It was an arrangement such as this which Dodd now faced, the master terminal linked by cable to the vasdy more powerful onboard computer.
With the right software, he could manage a nation, perhaps a world from here, and he could have designed a computer © manage this.
The information on D.R.E.A.D. was now his, as well as other secret information concerning how to access certain underground vault areas, located around the continental United States, in which were hidden even greater supply caches, information repositories, ultra sophisticated computers, weap
ons-everything from water to smallpox vaccines.
And there was bio warfare material listed there, too.
It was to be hoped that the people of the world would come to accept the natural leadership he offered, but if they failed to do so, utilizing the manpower reserves of the Nazis along with the sopWsticated hardware left for his use, he could wrest control, if need be.
The government of New Germany had the beginnings of nuclear weapons technology. It was possible that, someday, the Chinese of the Second City might locate the remainder of the pre-War Peoples Republic nuclear arsenal. But, in either case, there was no workable delivery system.
The Icelandics he totally dismissed, as he did the Wild Tribes of Europe, but for vasdy different reasons. The Icelandics would never dream of building or acquiring such weapons, and the Wild Tribes were too intellectually inferior to even consider them as a threat.
The Russians were now disarmed of nuclear weapons.
These were possessed by Mid-Wake.
Talks were underway between the Allies-Mid-Wake, New Germany. Lydveldid Island, The Chinese Second City and Eden-concerning how best to dispose of these weapons so they would never again be a threat to human survival.
Once the Soviet weapons were eliminated, Dodd would quietly prepare his own. The codes for use, as well as such tilings as location, megatonnage, etc., were all locked within the D.R.E.A.D. program.
He had, so far. been unable to fully access D.R.E.A.D., in order to allow use.
But that would come.
Already, doubt was building among the citizens of Eden, that perhaps Natalia Tiemerovna, out of jealousy, had engineered the destruction at the hospital, and was responsible for the deaths there. And even if John and Sarah Rourke were not fully dead, they were out of the picture, and would pose no threat.
The one obstacle was Kurinami, and as long as Nataha Tiemerovna and the Rourkes could be conveniently blamed for things, it might even be possible to stick them with culpability if Kurinami and his new wife needed to be liquidated.
The Rourke family-what remained of it-would be coming here, tonight or tomorrow night, here to his killing ground in search of information on the baby, and perhaps to seek revenge as well.
Dodd’s palms sweated slightly. On the desk in front of him was an M-16, fully loaded and ready for use, and holstered at his side was an M-9 Beretta, chamber loaded.
Hidden within the bowels of Eden One and in the snow drifts outside were enough of Deitrich Zimmer’s new SS men to handle the situation.
With John Rourke out of the picture, any Rourke family action was a lost cause…
She was taking a gamble, that Michael’s being a Rourke, his father’s son, would somehow be enough. But if she exercised a leadership function now, he never would; so, she did not.
And, so far, Michael Rourke was, indeed, his father’s son in the truest sense.
They were divided into two teams, good basic tactics. Michael had acquired a number of useful items from Colonel Mann to help compensate for the odds that more than likely would be mounted against them.
They waited at the edge of a long, drifted over ridge of dirt, just beside one of the pieces of earth moving equipment.
“Masks,” Michael said quietly.
Natalia reached to the bag slung beside her left breast, removing the M-17 gas mask (taken from the supplies at the Retreat) and pulling it on over her scarfed head, pulling down in the same motion, the scarf which covered the lower portioc of her face.
She popped the seals at the cheeks, the mask at least serv
ing to warm the air before she inhaled it, oddly comfortable (not usually the case with a gas mask).
Michael pulled his mask over the thin toque which he wore, looking for all the world like an SAS man, attired just as the British Special Air Service sometimes were, all in black; but no SAS man would ever have been caught with an American assault rifle.
He signalled her ahead, and they ran from their position of cover and concealment toward the remains of the bridge that had to be blown before the Eden Project Shutdes had been able to land, so long ago it seemed.
The concrete, jagged shapes, jutting almost angrily toward the stars, was snow packed. They hid behind it.
Strapped to Michaels back beside his pack was a German grenade launcher, not too dissimilar to the old 40mm grenade launchers of five centuries ago, rather shotgun-like in appearance, but firing a vastly wider array of rounds. Natalia observed as Michael broke the launchers action, then selected a round from the small pack slung from his right side.
There were tear gas. sound and light, high explosive and barricade penetration rounds, one of the latter was what he now chambered in the l
auncher.
He closed the launcher, brought it to his shoulder. The launcher was laser sight fitted, accurate to three hundred meters. She did not ask, but assumed he had set the sight for the barricade penetration round. Since each round had a slightly different weight, trajectory had to be adjusted accordingly.
“Be ready” Michael told her.
She grunted that she was, the remote for the simulators already in her left hand. Michael fired the launcher.
There was a whoosh, a blur along the same path as the pale red beam of the laser.
The starboard side of the shutde’s cargo bay took the hit, a short, light sounding explosion, and there was a hole in the fuselage large enough for a man to walk through without
bending over.
Natalia touched the controls on the remote, the simulators activating immediately from all sides of the shuttle, primer detonations as facsimiles of gunfire, small explosions, mmi-mortars whose projectiles exploded on time delay fuses whik still airborne, high wattage mini-speakers broadcasting laser audio disc recordings of incoming aircraft, fixed wing and helicopter.
It was like some American movie from before The Night of the War, special effects to such a degree that she almost believed they were real, almost thought that the armies of New Germany and the Marine Corps of Mid-Wake were closing on the position.
Michael just ahead of her, she ran with him toward the hole they had blown in the side of Eden One.
Michael stopped for an instant, closing the action of the grenade launcher he’d been reloading on the run, put the weapon to his shoulder and fired.
No expert marksmanship was required, the hole in the fuselage so large.
As the round struck, gas billowed back from inside the shuttle cargo bay.
By that time, Michael was already loading another round. She knew that this one would be sound and light.
Six
Annie gave a tug at her gas mask, then broke into a dead run, beside Paul as he started toward the shuttle’s main access, the explosion from the far side of the shuttle followed up by several more now, all the while the simulators making the night sound suddenly as though rival armies were competing with one another for the loudest possible noise of destruction.
Paul dropped to one knee, firing the grenade launcher the instant it came to his shoulder, a bole opening in the next instant along the portside fuselage. Paul broke the action, loaded, then fired again, Annie averting her eyes slightly because of the coming flash, too far from the explosion to have to hold her ears against the whistling howl of the sound and light grenade.
She ran to her right, her M-16 almost to her shoulder, Paul running left…
Paul Rubenstein was on line with the ‘entrance’ he had shot into the shuttle’s fuselage, and he started toward it, zig-zagging a little as he ran.
There were two schools of thought on an evasive running pattern when one was under fire, as John had once explained to him. One held that the fastest trip between point A and point B offered the least chance for mcoming fire to strike, while the second method opted for an erratic course between point A and point B lest an enemy shooter should try to lead his target.
Paul, after more experience than he really warned to remember, had struck on what he always hoped was the happy medium; if it was not, he would be dead and he wouldn’t have to worry about it anyway; he ran as rapidly as possible between points of cover, but always varied his course just enough that he couldn’t be led.
He hoped.
He was beside the fuselage now, ducking low near the vast craft’s underbelly for the added protection of the re-entry tiks lest someone start shooting through the fuselage.
If the baby were inside, the child was a risk, but as much so as other options available to them for entry, less than most.
Annie was in position by Eden One’s cockpit, bowling sound and light grenades through the open doorway …
Michael Rourke crossed left to right, Natalia right to left, through the hole in the portside fuselage, three sound and light grenades and a gas grenade going in ahead of them. There was the possibility that if his newborn brother were m-side, the child might suffer permanent nerve damage and be hearing impaired for life, but even that was a better prospect than death at the hands of Dodd and the Nazis.
Inside the opening, Michael dropped to cover behind the near end of a bank of cable-linked PCUs, the computers sputtering and spitting high voltage sparks. Gunfire tore into the console nearest him, the old-style monitor’s vacuum tube exploding with a loud pop and glass flying everywhere as Michael fired a burst from his M-16 across the ceiling formed by the closed shuttle bay doors.
He rolled a teargas grenade along the shuttle bay floor, toward the center of the enclosure, both Berettas corning into hs hands as he let the sated M-16 fall to his side on its sling.
Natalia was moving from cover to cover-packing crates -along the aft section of the shuttle bay, both .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolvers blazing in her hands.
Michael Rourke started forward, a man rising up from behind the PCUs, to start firing a German assault rifle. Michael fired first, a double tap from each pistol cutting into the man’s chest, bowling him back.
Assault rifle fire cut into the decking near his feet and Michael dodged left, firing both pistols from shoulder level, shattering another of the PCU monitors. A man with an M-16, the rifle still firing, but into the decking, tumbled from behind the computers …
Paul Rubenstein hurled his last gas grenade and drew the pistol with the grappling hook attachment from the holster-like case beside bis empty gas mask bag, taking three steps back, but staying well clear of the opening.
Paul Rubenstein took a last look toward his wife. Annie was still beside the cockpit hatchway, lobbing in more gas grenades.
Paul fired the pistol, the grappling hook spreading open as it punched upward, the thin synthetic rope behind it snaking out, uncoiling.
Paul tugged at the gun. grabbing a hank of rope in his left fist.
The grappling hook had caught. He hoped permanently.
He ran toward the shuttle fuselage, both the Schmiesser and the M-16 hanging from their slings at his sides. He jumped, reaching for more rope, feet against the fuselage. If anyone fired a sufficiendy heavy caliber rifle through the fuselage, he was dead …
“Natalia! Look out behind you!”
Natalia Tiemerovna wheeled around, dodging right as she did, her revolvers emptied and in her belt, her M-16 in her right fist.
She punched the assault rifle toward the fuselage opening, three men with M-16s firing on full auto, entering there. She fired her own rifle, just locking back the trigger, edging back toward cover.
Michael.
She heard the boom of his .44 Magnum revolver.
She dropped to her knees behind a packing crate, the fiber-board of the crate splintering away. She edged back still farther. As she emptied the M-16, she cut down one of the three, another of them already down thanks to Michael. But gunfire tore into the fuselage bulkhead near her and she dropped flat letting the M-16 fall away, snapping the PPK/S from the shoulder holster beneath her open coat and stabbing it toward a man with an M-16 who was shooting at her.
She fired the .380 twice, shattering his left cheekbone and blowing out his left eye.
Michael shouted to her, “Catch it!”
She looked up, one of Michael’s Berettas arcing toward her.
Under normal circumstances, she would have eschewed anyone throwing a gun, loaded or not, but now she was grateful for it, shifting the PPK/S to her left hand, catching the Beretta with her right.
The gun was safed, had a fifteen round magazine loaded and she assumed that was full as she thumbed off the safety and fired toward the third man in the fuselage opening, a double tap, then another and another, the man’s body almost pirouetting as it started to fall.
As she snapped her head left, she caught a glimpse of Michael Rourke, his M-16 in his right hand, the .44 Magnum revolver in h
is left.
Two men emerged from the far end of the rank of personal computer units in the forward section of the cargo bay, stolen M-16s chattering.
Michael was already firing.
Natalia punched the Beretta toward the men, holding it at shoulder level, firing …
Paul Rubenstein attained the height of the cargo bay, kneel-| ing there, taking the small charge of German plastique from his gear, slapping it down-it was magnetic-and hitting the arming switch, then the time delay switch. Fifteen seconds.
Paul edged back, almost curling himself into a ball along the tail section, counting down the seconds until detonation of the charge.
The blast came, very small, but he hoped just right for the task. When they had agreed on going after Dodd, they had realized full well that if Dodd were not in his tent, he would be here, and assuming this the more likely spot, planned accordingly.
He ran forward, an opening the size of the manhole covers one had seen in streets everywhere before the Night of The War, blasted into the joint where the cargo bay doors separated. He reached to his belt, hurtling down the rope with his right hand, a gas grenade with his left, shouting through his mask, “Grenade!” in the event that Michael or Natalia might be near enough that its concussion could injure them.
He thought about the baby for a split second.
There was no time to think about the child any more.
Paul Rubenstein threw himself down, the rope going taut, pulsing under his weight as he descended. From the start, trying to rescue the child was putting the child at risk. And there was nothing to do but pray for its safety …
Michael Rourke stabbed the .44 Magnum toward the head of a man and fired, the head exploding outward and blood and brains flowing backward from the exit wound in a pinkish gray cloud that was almost enough to make him throw up inside his gas mask-almost, but not quite.
The 629 empty, Michael advanced, one half-loaded Beretta 92F in his left fist.
As Paul descended, three of the enemy defenders opened fire from cover.
Michael snatched a gas grenade from his web gear, popping the pin as he freed the grenade, lobbing the grenade toward a stack of packing crates near the far port side of Eden One’s converted cargo bay.