by Ahern, Jerry
“What are you doing there?”
“I am climbing up onto this tank’s superstructure. I have to inspect the hatches on each tank and see they are satisfactorily locked down. That is my job. I learned that if I do not check such work myself, the men under me will become lax.”
“You will let me see your orders. Now!”
The man in the Nazi uniform was slightly built, blond haired, dark-eyed, sallow complected, as if somehow he never got out into the fresh air. Paul Rubenstein debated his possible
courses of action. He was, after all, looking for a diversion.
lust a moment. While I am up here, I will check this hatch.” Paul turned his back to die man, clambering up the superstructure to die hatch itself. He looked back, the Nazi just standing there on the deck, hands on his hips like he was getting ready to dance or something, Paul thought. Paul opened the hatch with some difficulty, the lock tricky but the weight considerably less than he had expected. Using his body to shield the work of his hands, he reached under his tunic, pulled the charge from the hook and pile fastener belt he wore, then flipped back the safety cover. He set the toggle switch and closed the cover, dropping the charge down into the tank’s interior.
He stood to his full height and closed the hatch. As he looked back, the Nazi had been joined by two Land Pirates.
“You will show me your orders and you will show me what you placed inside die tank.”
Paul’s body was still turned away from the Nazi and the other two men. His hands closed on the butts of the Browning High Powers beneath his jacket.
As he turned around, he said, “Sure I will,” then opened fire. Two shots per man, then two more-he dropped both Land Pirates who were flanking the Nazi. There was total silence on the deck for a split second. The Nazi looked up at him, incredulous. Paul Rubenstein pointed both Browning High Powers at the NazFs chest and fired.
Gunfire started hammering against the tank’s superstructure, but Paul Rubenstein was already jumping clear, running, toward the cover of the other tanks. In a few seconds, if a bullet didn’t catch him, he’d be protected enough to activate the detonator and send shrapnel flying all over the deck.
If a bullet didn’t catch him.
Eighteen
Killing one of the two Land Pirates with his knife, then placing the muzzle of his suppressor fitted 6906 against the forehead of the second, John Rourke got the information he required.
“Martin Zimmer’s in the Chiefs meeting room, probably.”
The Chief?”
The boss, ya’ know?”
“What’s his name?”
“We just call him ‘Chief, that’s all.”
“All right. This meeting room. Is it where the Chief briefs you on your raids and everything?”
“Yeah!”
“What’s on?”
“What?”
“What’s on, I said. Is there a raid planned?”
“Somethin’ big. They got Eden Army guys here and some of the Nazis, too.”
“Martin’s in the briefing room, then. Where is that?” John Rourke shoved the muzzle of the suppressor a little harder against the man’s forehead.
There was the sound of the man’s bowels releasing, and a smell even worse than the Land Pirate’s body odor, but he gave excellent directions. And, true to his word, John Rourke didn’t kill him, just slipped him an injection from the kit in his musette bag, putting him to sleep for a few hours.
Quickly, because time might already be up for Michael, John Rourke moved through the maze of fuel tanks, toward a staircase that would take him up to the level of the briefing
room…
When gunfire erupted on the main deck of the fortress, Natalia shouted, “Come on!”
And, Annie beside her, she started ranning toward the fortress.
This was more than they had bargained for, she realized, more activity, more enemy personnel. It was time to change the plan. From a pocket of her uniform tunic, she took some of the marble-sized German anti-personnel grenades, flipping their security covers, depressing their fuse starters, then throwing them toward the largest groups of enemy personnel she could find…
Michael Rourke, his twelve guards still surrounding lam, waited in what looked like an enormous briefing room, a table long enough to comfortably handle two dozen people, at its center. On the stone walls there were maps of the Americas, North, Central and South. There was a detailed map of the Wildlands, with positions marked on it in large, circled X shapes.
This was a war room.
After he heard the sound of a door opening, he turned toward his right.
Seven men entered, one of them a Land Pirate, two in black uniforms with Swastika armbands on the sleeve, three more in Eden field uniforms, each of these wearing the rank of a colonel or better.
The seventh man wore civilian casual clothes.
He was speaking to one of the Nazis as he entered, then stopped and turned around.
“You must be Michael. What a pleasant surprise! Or, are you John?”
Michael Rourke just stood there. He didn’t know what to say.
“We can’t steal this thing! We’d never escape! Destroy everything behind you!”
Natalia ran ahead of her, up the gangplank, Annie tiring her assault rifle into a knot of Land Pirates and Eden enlisted personnel, a hail of gunfire pinging against the hatchway’s superstructure as she cleared the gangplank.
She reached into her uniform tunic pocket, taking out some of the German anti-personnel grenades. She activated one, threw it, then another, then another.
Then, she reached to her head, snatching off the uniform hat she wore and shaking her hair free.
She threw the hat away, then started to run after Natalia.
The tank into which he’d dropped the plastique exploded, strips of razor-edged armor plate flying everywhere across the deck, a ball of fire rising, stopping at the ceiling of the garage structure, then biUowing outward in all directions as a wave of fire and smoke.
There had been no choice to any of this. If he had climbed down from the tank and conversed with the Nazi, he had no orders to show. If be had surrendered, once the charge was in place, he would have been forced with either, never activating it or committing suicide by standing there, waiting for it to explode.
Gurifire rippled along the deckplates, Paul Rubenstein ducking back, nothing to answer assault rifle fire with but his two 9mm pistols. Things were going wrong, but he had to find a way of making them go right or else all of them would die. Sirens sounded, smaller explosions starting. But in seconds, someone on deck would organize the now random resistance and there would be a charge against his position.
As he reached into his pocket for some of the marble-sized German anti-personnel grenades, his eyes stopped on something twenty yards away. It was one of the Eden gunships, its main rotor blades twisted and deformed by a piece of shrapnel from the destroyed tank.
But, a considerable distance away, the next closest gunship seemed in perfect condition.
Unlike the last time he had decided that taking up a gunship by himself was his only choice of action, this time he knew how to fly.
Paul Rubenstein flipped a handful of the grenades toward the greatest concentration of enemy fire, waited for the explosions -Siey came in rapid succession-then ran for the chopper…
“You look like me.”
Martin Zimmer smiled. “Or is it that I look like you? Really, we both look enough like John Rourke to be John Rourke, don’t we? You are Michael, I take it. John Rourke would probably have had something intensely witty to say, I mean.”
Tm Michael, yeah.”
A beeper sounded faintiy. Martin Zimmer took a pager sized unit from his belt and said, “Excuse me a moment.” Then he spoke into the machine, evidendy a two-way radio of some sort. “This is Martin … Oh, have they really? … Probably just the relatives stopping by … No, damnit! Don’t let them get one of the helicopters airborne!” He tossed the radio onto
the table. “Annie and Paul and Natalia, I assume? And John? Causing some trouble with the fortresses. But three or four people couldn’t cause that much trouble, even Rourkes. What was the plan, Michael? You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”
“Who the hell are your
“Fm Martin Zimmer! And Fm about to take over the world.
Nice of you to stop by, to congratulate me, no doubt” “Who are you, damnit?! Why do you look like-” “Like you? Like your father? Where is your father, Michael?
Was this some sort of diabolical plan to get in and asmqaat1
me?”
“That was the general idea, I think.”
“Well, it didn’t work.” Martin Zimmer smiled. “If John Rourke is lurking around somewhere ready to spring out and do something heroic, hell find he’s shit out of luck. I have ban
outnumbered and outwitted. The only way out of here would be with one of the fortresses, which he won’t get. And he’d never leave you behind, which means hell be showing up-“
The door through which Martin Zimmer and the six other men had entered, opened.
Michael’s lather said, “Just about now?”
Martin Zimmer wheeled toward him. The other men in the room-the twelve who had accompanied Michael and the six who had entered with Martin Zimmer, turned toward the door as well.
Michael Rourke stepped back, drawing both Berettas, ready to go down in a hail of gunfire.
Instead of an order to shoot, Martin Zimmer just laughed.
After the laughter died, he said, “Daddy.”
Michael held his pistols, but realized his hands were shaking.
Not counting Martin Zimmer, there were eighteen enemy personnel in the room. At any second, someone would start shooting.
This was it, unless his father had something up his sleeve.
From where he stood, he could see Martin Zimmer and John Rourke. They were identical in features and coloring and height, except for their clothes, each the mirror image of the other, as he was their image and they were his. A except for litde bit of gray in his lather’s hair.
No one spoke.
Mkhael couldn’t stand it anymore. “Who the hell are you, o^imnit!?”
Martin Zimmer didn’t look at him, only at John Rourke. But he said, “Jm your long tost brother. After you both drop your weapons, maybe, Mike, you and I can go outside and toss around a ball or something with old Dad here. And then Dad can tell me all about the birds and the bees or something.”
“Do you have Deitrich Zimmer’s surgical skills, Martin?” Michael’s father asked. “Because, if you do, you can save your mother’s life.”
“My mother!?” Martin Zimmer doubled over with laughter. And then he abrupdy stopped. “Mom’s not well, is she?”
There’s a bullet in her brain that son of a bitch, Deitrich Zimmer put there,” Michael shouted, the urge to kill stronger in him than it had ever been in his life, no matter who the enemy had been. Tell me he isn’t our brother, Dad! Tell me he isn’t our brother! Dad?”
Michael’s father, apparently expecting this all along, seemed very calm, didn’t even answer rum. Instead, he said to Martin, “He is the infant that Deitrich Zimmer killed more than a century ago when he escaped from Michael and the others, from that redoubt in the Andes. That litde boy was Lieutenant Martha I^rrimore’s child who was born the same day you were, wasn’t it? Deitrich Zimmer took both infants out of the hospital the night he firebombed it and got both Sarah and me.
“I don’t know the woman’s name, but you guessed right, Dad. I’m really impressed! Now, since you could never get out of here alive, hand me over those slick looking pistols of yours. Call it my inheritance, Dad. I have a war to start.”
Michael Rourke’s fingers tightened against the triggers of his Berettas.
This would be it.
“And Zimmer used cryogenics, didn’t he? He wanted a real world for you to conquer, one full of people, so he used cryogenic sleep until population caught up. That’s why Dodd and his successors farmed babies. That why you still do it. No fun nil-j ing an empty planet. But Deitrich Zimmer’s still alive. He i wouldn’t miss this. He’s got to be alive.” I
“Give me the damn guns, Daddy dear! They belong in my j fucking museum! Just like you belong in the grave!” |
For a moment, Michael almost shouted at his father, because f his father rolled both ScoreMasters in his hands and offered 1 them, butts forward, to Martin. 1
But then the momentary sickness Michael Rourke had felt in | the pit of his stomach, a momentary light-headedness, was gone, replaced by an adrenaline rush.
A smile crossed his hps.
Martin reached for the guns.
John Rourke’s hands dropped slightly, the guns moving in his
fingers as if they somehow had a life of their own. A double road agent spin.
Both pistols fired, talcing down the Nazis standing on either side of Martin.
Michael Rourke opened fire, both Berettas firing into anything that moved, the boom of his father’s .45s reverberating along the synth-concrete walls of the room. A bullet tore across Michael’s left thigh and he stumbled to his left knee, but kept firing.
The Beretta in his right hand was empty.
As he drew the 629 from his belt, he saw a blur of movement, his father, the six-inch barreled ‘44 Magnum he carried out, firing, then suddenly Martin was in front of him like a shield and Michael heard his father’s voice booming, “Drop your guns or he’s dead!”
“Don’t listen to Mm! He wouldn’t kill his son!”
A tightness came into Michael Rourke’s throat, not from the pain in his left leg, but from what his father said in die next second “That man over there is my son. You could have been, but you aren’t.”
Michael leaned back against the massive table leg, keeping the revolver and the one Beretta that still had a few rounds in the magazine, trained on the ten men who were still alive, some of them wounded, the others dropping their guns, raising their hands. His ears rang with the gunfire still. In seconds, half the Land Pirates in the stronghold would be beating down the doors to the briefing room.
John Rourke smiled. He said, “I heard your end of that radio conversation, Martin. You’re going to get to meet the rest of the family, all right, because they’ll realize that we can’t get one of the fortresses out of here, so they’ll take one of the helicopters and land it right in the courtyard. Reunion time, Martin.” And Michael’s father pressed the muzzle of the .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver against Martin Zimmer’s right temple.
Michael Rourke started changing magazines in his pistols, giving himself a few seconds before he tried to stand.
Nineteen
The controls on the Eden gunship, although she had studied Allied intelligence reports on the craft, were hard to get used to, so much computer assisted that getting the feel for the machine was virtually impossible.
With less grace than she liked, they had the craft airborne, for a moment terrified that with the low ceiling clearance above her in this vast hangar-sized garage complex, she would hit and crash the machine, killing them all.
Paul and Annie huddled inside the open fuselage door, hurling anti-personnel grenades in the machine’s wake, firing the door gun as Natalie let the gunship slip, the main rotor starting to drag. She increased power, the gunship’s downsweeping arc suddenly changing, the craft accelerating so rapidly that for an instant she thought she would crash them into the structure’s ceiling.
But she brought the machine level, banking as she cleared the doorway and was into the open. There was no chance to try to disable the gunships left behind.
She started to climb.
“If John and Michael don’t realize this is what we’re up to, you and Annie pull out,” Paul ordered. Til go in, and you back me up with some of those missiles. Make a real mess and then get the hell out of here before they send up some more choppers after us!”
As much as she didn’t like the idea o
f being protected, Paul made sense. If they were all captured or killed, then there would be no chance for any survivors to be freed-or the dead to be
avenged.
They had grossly miscalculated the manpower of die Land Pirates, but there was no intelligence data to indicate that Martin Zimmer was about to start a war.
She banked the helicopter to starboard in a long arc, checking the arming of her weapons systems. “Paul, help me up here! Annie, be ready by that door if we go in!”
Tm ready!” Annie called back.
Paul slid into the co-pilot’s seat beside her. “What do you want me to do?”
You read the same raptured manuals I did. Try to arm the missiles.” “All right.”
She could see die courtyard now, a crowd of figures that were indistinguishable at her current altitude corning out of the main structure within the courtyard. “Annie! Be ready with that machine gun!”
“Ready!”
“Paul, hurry those missiles.” Tm trying!”
She started descending, coming down in a tight circle over die courtyard. There were men on the walls, armed men, but no one was shooting at her.
Through the chin bubble, she could make out something about the figures below her. Some women, mosdy men,
She thought she could see John or Michael. It was Michael, and he was limping.
Now she could see details clearly. About two dozen women were in the courtyard, dressed in tattered rags, herded together, Michael urging them along, it seemed.
And there was a veritable army of Land Pirates and Eden personnel, and some in black uniforms as well.
She saw John, but blinked.
She looked back, saw Michael.
John and Michael and someone John had a gun on, who looked just like both of them.
“Who is that?” Annie shouted forward. “He looks like-ohh, my God.”
Natalia said, “Just be ready with that doorgun!” “Missiles armed. Tm going aft.” “Right, Paul.”
She let the machine turn a full 360 degrees on its main rotor.
Then sheeased slightly forward on her control stick and skated the machine down about twenty-five yards from the women.