Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend

by Ahern, Jerry

  “Good,” Hammerschmidt nodded.

  They continued down the stairwell, more of the hall below them becoming visible. It seemed to have been carved frocs the mountain’s fabric itself, or was perhaps a huge natural vault within the mountain to begin with, but there was rwthing that seemed manmade about it.

  The stairwell broke from within the natural seeming cylinder within the rock through which it passed, Michael Rourke and Natalia on the tread just above lum, stopping there.

  “The Hall of the Mountain King? perhaps,” Hammerschmidt suggested.

  The hall was vast enough that a small aircraft could hw operated within it with considerable impunity. As Michael started to say something, there was loud click.

  Natalia shouted, “Trap!”

  Firing ports opened from hidden positions within the ceflmg through which the stairwell passed, surrounding the stairweE totally. Michael Rourke shouted, “Hit the ropes!” And, as he said it, he dropped his already safed M-16 to his side on is sling, clamping on the lead from his vest’s rapelling pack to one of the verticals supporting the stairs. The muzzles of automoatic weapons began to protrude through the ports.

  Natalia was helping one of the German commandoes whose gear was malfunctioning. As he clamped on, Natalia began to access her own rapelling kit.

  Automatic weapons fire started from the firing ports and Michael Rourke vaulted over the railing, grabbing Natalia into

  his left arm and holding her against him, saying, “Hold onto me!” He jumped, gunfire everywhere around them now, bullets pinging off the metal substructure and the treads, some of Hanmierscmmdr’s men going down.

  A bullet tore across Michael’s right shoulder, skating over his vest’s ballistic layers. He nearly lost his hold of the rope, but held it, controlling their descent just enough that he could break their fall without snapping the rope.

  Down they went, other ropes snaking out around them, men skidding along them, gunfire from the floor of the hall now, some of the German personnel under Hammerschmidt’s command taking hits, some returning fire. Some men merely skidded along their ropes, out of control, others locked in place, dangling there, dead or wounded.

  Natalia shouted through her radio, “Look down!”

  Michael looked down.

  The source of the gunfire from below was a group of men in a ragged circle around the base of the stairs, perhaps fifty men in all.

  There was a voice over a loudspeaker system, shouting in German. *Hoid your fire! Hold your fire!”

  Michael Rourke slowly started their descent, Natalia still clinging © him. The men below them, in black BDUs with Nazi insignia armbands, held assault rifles, some fixed with bayonets.

  Michael eased Natalia and himself down the remaining twenty or so feet, separating from the rope as Natalia let go of him, both of them standing there, back to back, surrounded by Heimaccher and Zimmer’s Nazis.

  Hammerschmidt and those of his men who survived the rapel hit the floor, weapons raised and ready.

  Again, over the speaker system, came the same voice. “You will throw down your weapons and surrender to the forces of the Reich! Or, you will die!”

  Hanurierschmidt’s voice came through the radio set into Michael’s ear. ‘That is Zimmer’s voice, I think.”

  Michael estimated the odds at slightly better than three to

  one against them.

  He looked at Natalia. Visible through her mask, be coatt see her eyes as she blinked, just looking at him then.

  Michael Rourke nodded, licking his hps. He tore away BB gas mask. He could understand some German, speak very little of it despite having slept with a native German speaker. Maria Leuden. So, in English, he shouted, “I am Michari Rourke. I have come for the return of my brother. Who is m charge here?”

  Michael turned slowly around in a circle, looking at the faces surrounding ,them, the nearest of the Nazis encircling them was perhaps twenty yards away.

  The formation broke and Michael turned and looked. A man, smallish-looking, dark haired, a classic Hitlerlian mustache centered like a small black blotch at the middle of his upper lip, stepped through the opening. Like the others, he wore black, but he had a better tailor, Michael thought.

  “Is it Halloween?” Michael Rourke shouted to him. “I mean, you’re dressed up like Hider, and I certainly can’t see someone doing that everyday. The fake mustache is really great, by the way.”

  The man-Heimaccher, obviously-stopped, hands on his hips, his jodhpured legs thrown slightly forward as he threw his head back and laughed. “If you and these traitors with you surrender, your lives will be spared.”

  Michael Rourke nodded his head, inhaled, then spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “Unless your people are very good, there’s a superior rnilitary force all around and through this place, air power beating it apart and you’ve got about ten or twenty minutes before you’re overrun.”

  The self-styled Fuhrer said nothing, merely smiled.

  Michael Rourke continued. “I came for my brother, and I won’t leave until I have him. And, of equal importance really. I came for Deitrich Zimmer, to shoot his God damned brains out. If I interpret your intentions, we surrender, you hold us hostage against Colonel Mann’s forces taking you, then make some sort of dramatic escape, after which, of course, you’ll

  kill us anyway, right? Heimaccher started edging back.

  “Well,” Michael Rourke said, “not today.” Michael’s left hand rested on the butt of his crossdraw carried revolver, and he twist-drew the Smith & Wesson and double actioned the trigger, putting a single 180-grain jacketed hollow point into Albert Heimacchefs natural target, the mustache.

  Michael’s right hand swung up, the M-16 at his side, its safety tumbler set to full auto as he moved the muzzle of his revolver right and killed the nearest man to him who was about to return fire.

  As the Nazi went down, falling over Heimaccher’s already sprawling body. Michael Rourke jerked back the trigger of the M-16 and held it ag-zagging the muzzle of the assault rifle right and and left, killing as many of the Nazis as he could before one of them killed him.

  Gunfire was everyw”here.

  A bullet creased along Michael Rourke’s thigh, another across his right forearm.

  The M-.6 was already empty as the momentary shock caused hus to lose his grip on the weapon. The Smith & Wesson revolver was emptied as well, and Michael Rourke crashed it down over the head of a Nazi less than a yard from him, smashing the nose and teeth.

  There was a blur of motion beside him and he heard Natalia’s voice, uncftered bv a aas mask, shouting, “Dodge right!

  Nowr

  Michael Rourke sidestepped and ducked as he stabbed the revolver between his gunbelt and abdomen, his right hand, still a litrie numb, groping for the Beretta under his left arm.

  He had it. bat before he could use it, Natalia opened fire, hosinz rive phalanx of black-clad Nazis with 5.56mm from her rifle.”

  A Beretta 92F in each hand now, Michael Rourke fired into the men point blank, killing as many as he could.

  Nineteen

  Deitrich Zimmer had always prided himself on anticipating the moves of his enemies and countering them before they could be accomplished for his undoing.

  He walked along the corridor now, the baby screaming its lungs out for food or because its clothes were wet or dirtied or because it had gas or for some other one of the myriad reasons why babies screamed and cried and always had.

  None of that mattered. The National Socialist movement mattered and it was not confined to here, alone. In New Germany, there were partisans aplenty to aid him, and he had the means to get there; then start again. His sole purpose for coming to the redoubt had been accomplished, and gloriously.

  As he turned a bend in the corridor, he saw a little mechanical contrivance moving along the floor. He recognized it at once as a dumbass, the robotic sacrificial lamb that was one of New Germany’s most recent military developments.

  But, before Deitr
ich Zimmer could turn back, there were soldiers, and then the Jew, Rubenstein, and his wife. “Freezer the Jew shouted.

  There was a pump shotgun, rather primitive but devastatingly effective under the proper circumstances, in the womans hands. Its muzzle did not tremble. Zimmer took it as a sign of maturity and skill that she did not bother to work the action but already had the chamber loaded and merely pointed the gun at him.

  Zimmer’s pistol was pressed against the baby’s head. “No, I will not freeze, Jew, because I have the muzzle of my pistol and the litde boy’s head both, just where they should be. All that is necessary for me to do is to twitch my finger and the child dies. Even if you or your wife-she is a disgrace to her race-but if you or she should think that firing upon me will somehow negate my abilities to pull this trigger, then think again!”

  Zimmer pressured the muzzle of the pistol so hard against the baby’s head that the baby cried.

  The Rourke girl, now the Jew’s wife, shrieked at Zimmer, “Leave the baby alone, damn you! Try me! Afraid of a woman? Try me!”

  “Annie, hold off” the Jew told her. Then he turned his gaze toward Zimmer. “You kill that baby and death will be something you’ll beg for. Understand?”

  “I am so terribly frightened,” Zimmer laughed. “My hand is shaking so badly I might even pull the trigger of this pistol by accident.”

  The Jew and his bitch did nothing.

  But, Deitrich Zimmer had to get past them to survive this, to make the future of the world secure, for him.

  “We’re at an impasse,” the Jew called out. “Let the baby alone and you have my word that you’ll walk out of here alive ami unmolested. My word.”

  “The word of a Jew!?”

  The military commander with them was a lieutenant of good family, the last person Zimmer would have suspected of associating with a Jew or harboring anti-Nazi sentiments.

  “Kill the Jew, join me!”

  The young officer spat onto the corridor floor as he stood shoulder to shoulder with Rubenstein. What better place for a traitor than standing beside a Jew, Zimmer thought.

  The lieutenant announced, “If the child is killed, Herr Zimmer, you will have no leverage, and no other fate will await you but death. You must know that.”

  “I know, young man, that even a traitor must have sufficient

  intelligence to realize that, in my position, I will not surrender the baby. The only way any of you will get the child is as a corpse. If that is your wish, I can kill the child now.”

  Zimmer drew back slightly on the trigger.

  The Jew’s wife screamed at him, “He’s my brother, damn you! Don’t do it!”

  “Then, let me pass. Otherwise, I will spare this child the pain of growing up and discovering that his sister has defiled her race and her body by fucking-“

  “You son of a bitch!” she shouted, starting toward him.

  But Rubenstein ordered her, “Don’t, Annie!”

  She stood her ground, then, but the muzzle of the shotgun was shaking violendy.

  The Jew said, “Lieutenant, let him pass.”

  “But, Herr Rubenstein-“

  “Let him pass, Lieutenant.”

  The young officer cleared his throat, ordered his men, “Let this vile being pass.”

  Zimmer smiled, the muzzle of his weapon tight against the right temple of the screaming infant as he continued along the corridor, the Jew and the woman and the others falling back to let him pass.

  There was hatred in their eyes, and that was good, because when one acted out of hate, one acted less than rationally.

  Twenty

  The initial burst of gunfire had subsided because the weap ons in the hands of the Nazis were ill-suited to close quarter combat such as this and so comparatively powerful that severe of the Nazis fell dead by shots from their own comrade: rifles.

  In that alone, the Nazis were at a disadvantage. There wen so many of them that it was impossible to miss.

  The revolvers in her hands were empty now, but she usee both of them to crash down across the neck and shoulders o one of the Nazis who was locked in combat with Otto Ham merschmidt. Jabbing the guns into her belt, her right hanc swept over the pocket along her thigh and she had the Bali song, wheeling it open, as her right arm arced outward anc downward, averting her eyes from the blood spray as the tip oi the Wee-Hawk patterned blade caught the carotid artery of one of the Nazis and slashed it open.

  Something struck her, driving her to her knees, a man’s weight crushing her. Natalia twisted her head to the right. The man, one of the Nazis, was dead. She threw her shoulder against his chest and rolled him off. She came up in a crouch, her knife still in her hand. She thrust it forward, into the chest of one of the Nazis. His hands grasped her wrist in a death grip.

  Natalia drew her body back and kicked her right foot into

  bis testicles. He lurched back, and her hand slipped from the knife.

  It was as if fate were telling her to use the sword, she realized, because a Nazi, with a bayonet fixed below the muzzle of his rifle, charged toward her and it was either use the sword or die.

  Natalia’s left hand reached to the handle of the sword, starting it up from its sheath, her right hand grasping the hilt as she started to clear.

  She stepped back, the toes of her left foot pointing forward, her right foot shifting so she stood in a Tstance, the sword in a high guard position. As the man charged, Natalia spun 180 degrees right, sweeping the blade in a long arc as she dodged the bayonet, the sword meeting the Nazi’s throat at the adams apple, killing him.

  She backstepped on her right foot, the sword in a high guard position again, then cleaving outward and downward in a broad, fast arc across the left side of the neck of another of the Nazis.

  Natalia turned half left, edging her left foot back, the blade alive in her hands now, spinning as her eyes sought a new target …

  The heel of Michael Rourke’s left hand impacted one of the Nazis at the side of the nose, splattering blood everywhere but not killing the man. Michael Rourke’s gloved fingers gouged for a handful of flesh, finding it, twisting the man’s head toward him as Michael’s right arm punched forward, in his fist the knife made for him at Lydveldid Island by old Jon, the Swordmaker. Edge up, he drove the blade in well beneath the sternum and ripped as he pushed the man off his steel.

  About a dozen of the Nazis, firing handguns sporadically, were ranning toward the doors at the far end of the vaulted stone hall.

  Michael Rourke shouted as he wiped the blood from his blade across the back of a dead man, “After them! Come on!”

  Michael slipped the knife into the sheath as he broke into a run, jumping the body of another dead man as he started a fresh magazine up the butt of one of his Beretras …

  Deitrich Zimmer reached the end of the corridor, the doorway there, airtight, sealed.

  Behind him, the Jew and his wife and the traitorous soldiers kept close watch, weapons ready for him to lose his concentration for that single second that would allow them a shot.

  Zimmer smiled inwardly.

  If he released the baby to open the door, they would have him. If he released the gun, they would have him.

  And, beyond this doorway lay the future of mankind.

  Carefully, his eyes on them every second, he shifted the baby (townwani placing the muzzle of the pistol into the baby’s mouth.

  “You bastard!” It was the bitch who shrieked at him.

  Zimmer let the smile inside of him show on his face. Carefully, he shifted the pistol from his right hand to his left, holding it awkwardly but well enough and obviously so that his ability » pull the trigger and blow the child’s head to nothingness would not be impaired.

  With his right hand, now, he opened the wheel lock on the door.

  He stepped through and into the windy blast.

  The air forces of New Germany pummeled the redoubt, gunships and J7-Vs everywhere.

  The facade of synth-concrete covering the sup
erstructure of the redoubt was largely blasted away now.

  In moments, the redoubt would totally fall and the anti-Nazis would think they had won, which was even better than he could have planned.

  Deitrich Zjmmer approached the loaf-shaped structure set into the rocks, his now free right hand finding the control set in his pocket, his thumb flipping back the guard, then depressing the switch.

  His eyes settled on the doorway, the Jew Rubenstein and the others waiting for him to make the slightest misstep.

  He looked back toward the loaf-shaped rock; it was already rotated away, the powered half-track sled waiting for him as it had been for Albert Heimaccher before Zimmer had availed himself of the control unit. Within the enclosed vehicle were emergency rations, emergency weapons, and supplies.

  Zimmer activated the next button, the cover of the sled rising upward and forward.

  Zimmer eyed his enemies.

  His timing would have to be precise.

  Carefully, the baby turning blue with the cold, his own hands starting to numb, he approached the sled, then stepped up and inside.

  Rather than closing the bullet resistant cocoon around him. he activated the sled controls, the engine purring to life. He started the machine moving slightly forward, glancing back to his enemies. They were through the doorway, weapons shouldered and ready.

  The machine reached the edge of the snow covered ramp.

  Deitrich Zimmer retook the pistol in his right hand, holding up the screaming child, the muzzle of the weapon still in the child’s mouth.

  Zimmer turned toward the Jew and the others, shouting to them, “I have won!”

  He fired the pistol, casting the dead infant away as the hail of bullets started, his left hand hitting the cocoon control, his right hand discarding the pistol, working the lever to power the machine to full.

  Bullets zinged off the body structure, a pellet from a shotgun blast tearing into his right shoulder.

  The sled was already picking up momentum.

  The Jew threw himself onto the cocoon, hammering at it with a rifle butt, then the rifle railing away, the Jew’s fists pounding on the covering.